In this paper we elaborate a model to describe some aspects of the human lung considered as a continuous, deformable, medium. To that purpose, we study the asymptotic behavior of a spring-mass system with dissipation. The key feature of our approach is the nature of this dissipation phenomena, which is related here to the flow of a viscous fluid through a dyadic tree of pipes (the branches), each exit of which being connected to an air pocket (alvelola) delimited by two successive masses. The...

We study the initial boundary value problem for the system of thermoelasticity in a sequence of perforated cylindrical domains $Q_T^{\left(s\right)}$, s = 1,2,... We prove that as s → ∞, the solution of the problem converges in appropriate topologies to the solution of a limit initial boundary value problem of the same type but containing some additional terms which are expressed in terms of quantities related to the geometry of $Q_T^{\left(s\right)}$. We give an explicit construction of that limit problem.