IMAGE-BASED COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS IN A CAROTID ARTERY

摘要

Literature presents numerical simulations on image-based geometry where blood is treated as a Newtonian fluid, while others simulations assumed a non-Newtonian blood with two or three-dimensional axisymmetric geometry. The present work investigates the non-Newtonian behavior of a pulsating blood flow through a stenosed carotid artery, realistically reconstructed with the patient-specific geometry of a 60 years old man with an intimal thickening of 90% degree of stenosis. Lumen boundary contours are segmented using commercial image-processing software AMIRA for a 3D geometry reconstruction. High-quality tetrahedral mesh is generated using commercial mesh-generator code GAMBIT. The 3-D unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved using the commercial finite volume code FLUENT. The boundary condition is assumed from a flow-rate-wave of the literature using the FFT method and imposing a pressure sinusoidal signal with 20 harmonics.