Abstract
Many numerical studies of blood flow impose a rigid wall assumption due to the simplicity of its implementation compared to a full coupling with a solid mechanics model. In this paper, we present a localised method for incorporating the effects of elastic walls into blood flow simulations using the lattice Boltzmann method implemented by the open-source code HemeLB. We demonstrate that our approach is able to more accurately capture the flow behaviour expected in elastic walled vessels than ones with rigid walls. Furthermore, we show that this can be achieved with no loss of computational performance and remains strongly scalable on high performance computers. We finally illustrate that our approach captures the same trends in wall shear stress distribution as those observed in studies using a rigorous coupling between fluid dynamics and solid mechanics models to solve flow in personalised vascular geometries. These results demonstrate that our model can be used to efficiently and effectively represent flows in elastic blood vessels.
Highlights
Many numerical studies of blood flow impose a rigid wall assumption due to the simplicity of its implementation compared to a full coupling with a solid mechanics model
We demonstrate how our model is able to capture the essence of elastic wall flow in a similar domain whilst not losing computational performance compared to a rigid wall model
In this paper we have presented a boundary condition that allows key features of elastic walled flow such as velocity profiles near walls and wall shear stress variations to be captured without the need to implement a complex computational coupling with a solid mechanics solver
Summary
Many numerical studies of blood flow impose a rigid wall assumption due to the simplicity of its implementation compared to a full coupling with a solid mechanics model. We illustrate that our approach captures the same trends in wall shear stress distribution as those observed in studies using a rigorous coupling between fluid dynamics and solid mechanics models to solve flow in personalised vascular geometries These results demonstrate that our model can be used to efficiently and effectively represent flows in elastic blood vessels. With a view towards creating virtual human-scale models, we are developing the capability to conduct full human simulations of arterial and venous vascular geometries using the open-source blood flow simulator HemeLB6–12 This solver has been optimised to deal with the complex and sparse geometries characteristic of vascular domains. All the simulations described in this work have been performed using the HemeLB code
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