Unsteady blood flow and mass transfer of a human left coronary artery bifurcation: FSI vs. CFD

Abstract

In this study, a Fluid Solid Interaction analysis (FSI) of a computerized tomography (CT) scan reconstructed left coronary artery was performed. The arterial wall was modeled as an isotropic hyperelastic material. The arterial wall shear stress (WSS) was computed in order to investigate a correlation between flow-induced wall shear stress and geometry of the artery. An unsteady state FSI analysis with a commercial finite element software was performed in order to evaluate the maximum and the minimum wall shear stress as a function of the flow regime and the arterial wall compliance in the left coronary. As boundary conditions, physiological pressure waveforms were applied. Comparison of the computational results between the FSI and rigid-wall models showed that the wall shear stress (WSS) distributions were substantially affected by the arterial wall compliance. In particular, the minimum and maximum WSS values significantly vary.