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Poiseuille’s Law Assists in Knowledge About the Human Body Essay

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Poiseuille’s law states the volume in a tube is directly proportional to pressure difference between both ends of the tube and inversely related to the length. Poiseuille’s law was discovered by Jean Louis Marie Poiseuille in 1840 (Poiseuille’s). Jean Louis used his experiments to find the smooth, laminar flow in circular tubing (Jean-Louis). His findings can be described as the flow of blood through the body and bronchial smooth muscle.
When the resistance of a fluid increases, the flow will decrease. One example of this is gravy and milk. Gravy has a greater resistance than milk and will take longer to flow out of a pitcher. The same can be said about respiratory therapy equipment. An increase in viscosity will decrease the flow. When …show more content…

Increasing in the length of the endotracheal tube will require additional pressure to be needed to get the adequate amount of oxygen into the lungs.
The bronchial tubes increase in length and diameter during inhalation. Bronchial tubes decrease in length and diameter during exhalation. Poiseuille’s law can be applied to the lungs when the bronchial tubes become constricted due to an increase in mucus production and can decrease in size. When the bronchial tubes decrease in size and the patient is breathing, it is going to take more pressure to move the air into the swelled bronchi. If the radius of a patient’s bronchial tubes increased by sixteen percent, the pressure to move oxygen into the lungs would double. Therefore, a patient with bronchial smooth muscle constriction of sixteen percent would have to double their driving pressure to keep a constant flow rate. If swelling occurs and the patient does not increase their pressure, the amount of oxygen they are getting to their lungs will decrease. Respiratory therapists can see this taking place in patients with asthma that have excess mucus secretions.
In conclusion, without the assistance of Poiseuille’s law, a patient with bronchial constriction would not get the adequate amount of oxygen to feed the tissues. Poiseuille’s law states that if the radius of a tube decreases by sixteen percent, the flow rate will decrease by half. In today’s modern medicine

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