Simulation of transient blood flows in the artery with an asymmetric stenosis

Abstract

This article focuses on the transient behaviour of blood flow in stenotic arteries. Human blood is modelled as an incompressible non-Newtonian fluid. A numerical technique based on the finite element method is developed to simulate the blood flow taking into account of the transient periodic behaviour of the blood flow in cardiac cycles. The flow pattern, the distribution of pressure and the wall shear stresses, are computed. The results show that the pulsatile pressure and the time variation of wall shear rate have patterns similar to that for the pulsatile velocity during the cardiac cycles. On the back toe of the stenosis there exists a small recirculation region which causes the direction of the wall shear stress in some part to oscillate, likely leading to atherosclerotic disease. The back toe is thus an ideal location for applying a clot dissolving drug. References D. N. Ku, Blood flow in arteries, Annual Review of FLuid Mechanics 29 (1997) 399--434. D. Mann and J. Tarbell, Flow of non-Newtonian blood analog fluids in rigid curved and straight artery models, Biorheology 27 (1990) 711--733. M. Grigioni, C. Daniele and G. D'Avenio, The role of wall shear stress in unsteady vascular dynamics, Progress in Biomedical Research 7 (3) (2002) 204--212. K. B. Chandran, J. H. Mun, K. K. Choi, J. S. Chen, A. Hamilton, A. Nagaraj and D. D. McPherson, A method for in-vivo analysis for regional arterial wall material property alterations with alterosclerosis: preliminary results, Medical Engineering and Physics 25 (2003) 289--298. M. Bonert, J. G. Myers, S. Fremes, J. Williams and C. R. Ethier, A numerical study of blood flow in coronary artery bypass graft Side-to-Side Anastomoses, in Annals of Biomedical Engineering 30 (2002) 599--611. D. Y. Fei, J. D. Thomas and S. E. Rittgers, The effect of angle and flow rate upon hemodynamics in distal vascular graft anastomoses: a numerical model study, Journal of Biomechanical Engineering 116 (1994) 331--336. M. H. Song, M. Sato, Y. Ueda, Three dimensional simulation of coronary artery bypass grafting with the use of computational fluid dynamics, Surg Today 30(2000), 993--998. B. Wiwatanapataphee, D. Poltem, Y. H. Wu and Y. Lenbury, Simulation of pulsatile flow of blood in stenosed coronary artery bypass with graft, Mathematical Biosciences 3 (2) (2006) 371--383. S. Glagov and C. K. Zarins and D. P. Giddens and D. N. Ku, Hemodynamics and Atherosclerosis, Insights and perspectives gained from studies of human arteries, Archieves of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine 112 (1988) 1018--1031.