Computational Simulation of Blood Flow in the Right Coronary Artery and its Interaction Between the Blood Flow and the Arterial Wall

Abstract

Abstract Flow through a heart artery is modeled using computational fluid dynamics with and without a more detailed fluid-solid interaction model. The study describes the interactions between the blood flow and the arterial wall. Blood rheological properties are modeled using the Bird-Carreau model under steady state conditions. The flow path is comprised by the right coronary artery and two branches (bifurcations) namely the acute marginal and the posterior descending sections. Inlet velocity values of a typical cardiac cycle are used in the model. The differences between the solutions from the FSI model and the CFD model were determined by comparing the wall shear stress and the first principal stress. Wall shear stresses and first principal stresses for four separate times (0.05, 0.14, 0.44 and 0.96 s) are reported. At 0.14 s and at 0.96 s, the values of the WSS maximum are greater than those previously computed using FSI by 10.8 Pa and 7.5 Pa. Similarly at 0.44 s, significant differences were obtained in the WSS distributions between both solutions. The highest magnitudes of first principal stresses were of 552 kPa in the bifurcation of the PDA at a time of 0.44 s.