Effects of elastic property of the wall on flow characteristics through arterial stenoses

Hemodynamic characteristics of blood flow through arterial stenoses are numerically investigated in this work. The blood is assumed as a Newtonian fluid and the pulsatile nature of flow is modeled by using measured values of the flowrate and pressure for the canine femoral artery. An isotropic elastic and incompressible material is assumed for the wall at each axial section, but a non-uniform distribution of the shear modulus in axial direction is used to model the high stiffness of the wall at the stenosis location. Full Navier equations for a thick wall are used as the governing equations for the wall displacements. A continuous grid extending over the flow field and the wall is considered and governing equations are transformed for use in the computational domain. Discretized forms of the transformed wall and flow equations, which are coupled through the boundary conditions at their interface, are obtained by control volume method and simultaneously solved using the well-known SIMPLER algorithm. To study the effects of wall deformability, solutions are obtained for both rigid and elastic walls. The results indicate that deformability of the wall causes an increase in the time average of pressure drop, but a decrease in the maximum wall shear stress. Displacement and stress distributions in the wall are presented. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.