Numerical Simulations of Flows in a Cerebral Aneurysm Using the Lattice Boltzmann Method with the Half-Way and Interpolated Bounce-Back Schemes

Abstract

Lattice Boltzmann simulations and a velocity measurement of flows in a cerebral aneurysm reconstructed from MRA (magnetic resonance angiography) images of an actual aneurysm were carried out and the numerical results obtained using the bounce-back schemes were compared with the experimental data to discuss the effects of the numerical treatment of the no-slip boundary condition of the complex boundary shape of the aneurysm on the predictions. The conclusions obtained are as follows: (1) measured data of the velocity in the aneurysm model useful for validation of numerical methods were obtained, (2) the numerical stability of the quadratic interpolated bounce-back scheme (QBB) in the flow simulation of the cerebral aneurysm is lower than those of the half-way bounce-back (HBB) and the linearly interpolated bounce-back (LBB) schemes, (3) the flow structures predicted using HBB and LBB are comparable and agree well with the experimental data, and (4) the fluctuations of the wall shear stress (WSS), i.e., the oscillatory shear index (OSI), can be well predicted even with the jaggy wall representation of HBB, whereas the magnitude of WSS predicted with HBB tends to be smaller than that with LBB.