PHysics
A medical technician is trying to determine what percentage of a patient's artery is blocked by plaque. To do this, she measures the blood pressure just before the region of blockage and finds that it is 1.20×104 Pa, while in the region of blockage it is 1.15×104 Pa. Furthermore, she knows that blood flowing through the normal artery just before the point of blockage is traveling at 30.0 cm/s [.3 m/s], and the specific gravity of this patient's blood is 1.06.
What percentage of the cross-sectional area of the patient's artery is blocked by the plaque?
*I'm not even sure where to start for this problem. There are no examples like it in my book...*
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Answers
This problem requires some additional information that is not given, such as the cross-sectional area of the patient's artery and the amount of force that the plaque is impeding on it. With this information, one could use the equation for Bernoulli's principle, which states that the pressure plus the kinetic energy of the fluid divided by its density is constant, to determine the percentage of the artery blocked by the plaque.
