Local Wall Stress Research Articles

The minimal flow unit in near-wall turbulence

Direct numerical simulations of unsteady channel flow were performed at low to moderate Reynolds numbers on computational boxes chosen small enough so that the flow consists of a doubly periodic (inxandz) array of identical structures. The goal is to isolate the basic flow unit, to study its morphology and dynamics, and to evaluate its contribution to turbulence in fully developed channels. For boxes wider than approximately 100 wall units in the spanwise direction, the flow is turbulent and the low-order turbulence statistics are in good agreement with experiments in the near-wall region. For a narrow range of widths below that threshold, the flow near only one wall remains turbulent, but its statistics are still in fairly good agreement with experimental data when scaled with the local wall stress. For narrower boxes only laminar solutions are found. In all cases, the elementary box contains a single low-velocity streak, consisting of a longitudinal strip on which a thin layer of spanwise vorticity is lifted away from the wall. A fundamental period of intermittency for the regeneration of turbulence is identified, and that process is observed to consist of the wrapping of the wall-layer vorticity around a single inclined longitudinal vortex.

Assessment of regional left ventricular relaxation in patients with coronary artery disease: importance of geometric factors and changes in wall thickness.

To assess local myocardial relaxation abnormalities in patients with coronary artery disease, local myocardial left ventricular wall stress was computed in nine normal subjects and in 22 patients with coronary artery disease. In normal left ventricles, the rate of decrease in isovolumic local stress was not significantly different from the rate of decrease in isovolumic pressure, and the residual wall stress at the end of isovolumic relaxation was uniformly low. In patients with coronary artery disease, the residual wall stress was increased both in infarcted areas and in non-infarcted areas perfused by stenosed arteries (43 +/- 31 and 30 +/- 19 kdyne/cm2, respectively, vs 9 +/- 5 kdyne/cm2 in normal areas; p less than .001). The rate of decrease in local stress in infarcted areas paralleled the rate of decrease in pressure (48 vs 49 msec; NS), but in ischemic areas the rate of decrease in stress was significantly slower than the rate of decrease in pressure (69 +/- 35 vs 48 +/- 15 msec; p less than .05). It is concluded that in patients with coronary artery disease, indexes based only on the analysis of decreases in isovolumic pressure underestimate the severity of local impairments in relaxation rate and cannot be used to predict the level of residual diastolic wall stress.

A model of asynchronous left ventricular relaxation predicting the bi-exponential pressure decay.

A new model for the pressure relaxation of the left ventricle is proposed. The model presumes that the myocardium relaxes asynchronously, but that when regions begin to relax, after a delay, the local wall stress decays as a mono-exponential process. This formulation results in an apparently bi-exponential process (two time constants) which has been previously reported. It is shown that the ratio of the two time constants (T2/T1) can be interpreted as the fraction of the myocardium which relaxes synchronously. Data are presented illustrating the Model during transient coronary occlusion in patients undergoing percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty.