Breathing as an isothermal time-periodic process with gas exchange in a deformable porous medium.

Pavel Krejci (Czech Academy of Sciences, Praga)

Abstract. We propose to model the lungs as a viscoelastic deformable porous medium driven by time-periodic forces on the boundary with a degenerate hysteretic pressure–volume relationship described by the Preisach operator. Breathing is represented as an isothermal process with gas exchange between the interior and exterior of the body. The main result consists in proving the existence of a periodic solution under an arbitrary periodic forcing in suitable function spaces. The talk is based on a joint work with Michela Eleuteri, Erica Ipocoana, and Jana Kopfová.