Physics of 300-year-old firefighting methods could inform how our hearts work

A Windkessel could be a shunt pipe with a flexible dam, and that's analogous to the flexible pipe, like the artery. Flexible pipes have a shunt capacitance and so they act as filter caps.

I was thinking about all this yesterday and it occured to me that, I suspect, when we put water capacitors in series (i.e. two or more rubber dams across the same pipe), it should also work to reduce the total capacitance, just like electronic capacitors.

If you think about it, the same pressure, if it has to work against two dams in series, will cause a small displacement of rubber, then if there is only one. Two thin rubber dams in series are like one thick one, and that has less capacitance due to being harder to displace. Capacitance is how much the rubber will stretch in the face of a given amount of pressure, thereby accommodating a volume of water.

Two successive dams will never have more capacity because they work to cancel each other. The second dam only stretches to absorb exactly the quantity of water displaced by the first dam; it doesn't provide additional capacity. And due to two dams being harder to stretch, the capacitance (volume pushed per pressure) is reduced.

I think I'm going to add this to my old Electronics StackExchange answer:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/68406/why-do...