Some singular perturbation problems in renal models (Q1123102)

Mathematical models of the kidney involve the use of ordinary differential equations to simulate the transport of solutes and water through the tubules of the nephrons and capillaries. The tubule walls are known to be to some degree permeable and to selectively allow solutes or water to leak in or out. An important technique in the study of these models is the simplification of the differential equations through the assumption of equal solute concentrations in certain tubules. The equilibrium of solute concentrations is presumed to be caused by large permeabilities in the tubule walls. In this paper we give a justification of the assumption that large permeabilities result in an equilibrium of concentrations. We write the system of differential equations and boundary conditions that represent fluid and water transport in a system of flow tubes, and we interpret certain permeabilities as the reciprocal of a singular perturbation parameter. The resulting singular perturbation problem is a problem of ``singular'' type. We use some earlier results to provide an asymptotic analysis of the solution, to identify the missing boundary conditions in the reduced problem and to identify the boundary layers in the solution. The analysis is carried out in three cases, corresponding to three different arrangements of the flow tubes. In Section 2, we treat a simple case of two tubes in a counterflow arrangement. It is of interest in this case to determine which boundary conditions are lost in the singular perturbation limit. Speaking loosely we find that the tube with the smaller entering flow loses the boundary condition. In Section 3 we consider the case of two tubes wrapped around an ``interstitium''. The limiting process here represents the process that was used earlier to derive the central core model of the kidney. In Section 4 we consider an arrangement of four tubes to model a water extraction model of the renal concentrating mechanism. We treat a solution consisting of water and a single solute. The analogous problems with several solutes present are more important for kidney models, but are mathematically more complicated. These problems have not yet been analyzed.