I did attend the online event, a webinar. It was given by Dr Franca Schmid of Switzerland, and hosted by Interpore, an international organisation dealing with porous media in general. I personally found it very interesting and was pleasantly surprised that I understood so much.
Quite a bit of the terminology is outside of my frequent use, e.g. perfusion, others well within, and still others…well I would need to look them up. She spoke a lot about blood flow in capillaries, the deformation of many red blood cells (the resting radii being greater than the radius of the capillary itself, hence the need for the use of energy to squeeze the blood cell out of shape), and the effect of partial blockages in the capillary itself. Large blood cells cause quite a large local pressure drop, and this has to be accounted for. Note that blood flow in capillaries, though slow due to the size of capillaries, remains pulsatile.
There was use of network models, suitably randomised, to mimic the overall properties of a mass of blood vessels. I have used network models in the context of heat transfer, which also involves transport of a kind. The overall aim here was to bridge the gap between the microscopic (as described) and the macroscopic (to model a sizeable chunk of human brain) which is describable at present using only averaged quantities. So the message was: both are important, but how do they relate? It’s like quantum theory and relativity: both describe reality enormously well in their respective domains, but no-one has yet found any connection between them.
Here one needs a fair few few mathematical skills, but also a good working knowledge of computational fluid dynamics, in order to even begin to bridge that gap and find any connection. Enter many PhD students and worldwide collaborators.
So it is all at too early a stage for us who are seeking answers to our various questions, or for what we need to do practically here and now. This isn’t a great surprise to me, but I am glad that it is being done.
I apologise that this was too technical, but I had a bit of a hope that this might be of some use to us, even if it were to help to explain the beginnings of a stroke. But given that I said that I would report back, I have tried to discharge that duty.