We saw in the last chapter that in the large arteries blood may be treated as a homogeneous fluid and its particulate structure ignored. Furthermore, fluid inertia is a dominant feature of the flow in the larger vessels since the Reynolds numbers are large. The fluid mechanical reasons for treating the circulation in two separate parts, with a division at vessels of 100μm diameter, were also given in that chapter. In the microcirculation, which comprises the smallest arteries and veins and the capillaries, conditions are very different from those in large arteries and it is appropriate to consider the flow properties within them separately.

First, it is no longer possible to think of the blood as a homogeneous fluid; it is essential to treat it as a suspension of red cells and other formed elements in plasma. As will be seen later in the chapter, this comes about because even the largest vessels of the microcirculation are only approximately 15 red cells in diameter. Second, in all vessels, viscous rather than inertial effects dominate and the Reynolds numbers are very low; typical Reynolds numbers in 100μm arteries are about 0.5 and in a 10μm capillary they fall to less than 0.005 (see Table I).

In larger arteries, the Womersley parameter α (p. 60) is always considerably greater than unity. In the microcirculation, however, α is very small; in the dog (assuming a heart rate of 2Hz) it is approximately 0.08 in 100μm vessels and falls to approximately 0.005 in capillaries. This means that everywhere in these small vessels the flow is in phase with the local pressure gradient and conditions are quasi-steady.