Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Blood Flow in the System of Coronary Arteries with Stenosis

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a mathematical model of turbulence flow of fluid through a deformable channel to study the pulsatile blood flow in the coronary system with arterial stenosis. Blood is assumed to be an incompressible non- Newtonian fluid and its motion is considered as turbulent and modelled by the mass and momentum conservations with turbulent mixing energy and specific dissipation rate. The mechanical deformation of the arterial wall is modelled by a hyperelastic differential equation. The pulsatile behaviour during each heartbeat is assigned on the entrance and exit boundaries. Numerical simulation based on the Finite Element method for the solution of arterial wall deformation, and the Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian Finite Volume method for the turbulence fluid-flow solution is used to investigate the effect of stenosis severity at the proximal part of the left anterior descending artery on the blood velocity, the pressure distribution and the wall shear stresses along the flow direction.