Abstract
Pulsatile flow simulations of non-Newtonian blood flow in an axisymmetric multistenosed artery, subjected to a static magnetic field, are performed using FLUENT. The influence of artery size and magnetic field intensity on transient wall shear stress, mean shear stress, and pressure drop is investigated. Three different types of blood, namely, healthy, diabetic, and anemic are considered. It is found that using Newtonian viscosity model of blood in contrast to Carreau model underestimates the pressure drop and wall shear stress by nearly 34% and 40%, respectively. In addition, it is found that using a magnetic field increases the pressure drop by 15%. Generally, doubling the artery diameter reduces the wall shear stress approximately by 1.6 times. Also increasing the stenosis level from moderate to severe results in reduction of the shear stress by 1.6 times. Furthermore, doubling the diameter of moderately stenosed artery results in nearly 3-fold decrease in pressure drop. It is also found that diabetic blood results in higher shear stress and greater pressure drop in comparison to healthy blood, whereas anemic blood has a decreasing effect on both wall shear stress and pressure drop in comparison to healthy blood.
Highlights
Atherosclerosis is an accumulation of cholesterol-laden plaque in arterial walls that causes a narrowing or stenosis and a loss of elasticity in the arteries at various sites
The interplay between oscillatory inertia forces and viscous forces in flowing blood is characterized by the Womersley number, a nondimensional parameter relevant to this type of flow
The nonNewtonian viscosity along with pulsatile velocity which is a function of the strain rate resulting in changing viscosity spatially and temporally makes it meaningless to compute a Womersley number under such conditions
Summary
Atherosclerosis is an accumulation of cholesterol-laden plaque in arterial walls that causes a narrowing or stenosis and a loss of elasticity in the arteries at various sites. Tan et al [1] linked the growth, progression, and structure of plaque in a 70% carotid symmetric stenosis at rupture to the oscillating wall shear stresses using pulsatile transitional simulations. Grinberg et al [3] analyzed the flow in stenosed carotid artery using three-dimensional transient model and a simplified two-dimensional slice, since the latter is more appropriate as clinical tool. Their results revealed that regions of unsteady laminar flow characterize the state of the flow and a subregion of turbulence, starting downstream of the stenosis and extending about five to six centimeters farther downstream. The study proposed that varying the effect of the magnetic field in, for example, clinical magnetotherapy, can regulate the volumetric flow rate
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