Copyright © 2012 M. Tziannaros and F. T. Smith. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Understanding and quantifying more of the workings of the human bladder motivates the present industry-supported study. The bladder performance in terms of the urinary velocities produced tends to be dominated by the internal fluid dynamics involved, in the sense that the bladder wall moves in a body-prescribed way. The enclosed urine flow responds to this wall movement, and there is relatively little feedback on the wall movement. Combined computational work and special-configuration analysis are applied over a range of configurations including computational and analytical results for the circle and sphere as basic cases; models of more realistic bladder shapes; the end stage of the micturition process where the bladder is relatively squashed down near the urethral sphincter and localised peak speeds arise. The combination of approaches above can be extended to allow for interaction between wall shape and flow properties such as internal pressure if necessary.