Mathematical Homogenization in the Modelling of Digestion in the Small Intestine

Abstract

Digestion in the small intestine is the result of complex mechanical and biological phenomena which can be modelled at different scales. In a previous article, we introduced a system of ordinary differential equations for describing the transport and degradation-absorption processes during the digestion. The present article sustains this simplified model by showing that it can be seen as a macroscopic version of more realistic models including biological phenomena at lower scales. In other words, our simplified model can be considered as a limit of more realistic ones by averaging-homogenization methods on biological processes representation.