Computational comparison between Newtonian and non-Newtonian blood rheologies in stenotic vessels

Keywords

Computational Medicine for the Cardiocirculatory System
Code:
19/2016
Title:
Computational comparison between Newtonian and non-Newtonian blood rheologies in stenotic vessels
Date:
Thursday 5th May 2016
Author(s):
Guerciotti, B.; Vergara, C.
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Abstract:
This work aims at investigating the influence of non-Newtonian blood rheology on the hemodynamics of 3D patient-specific stenotic vessels, by means of a comparison of some numerical results with the Newtonian case. In particular, we consider two carotid arteries with severe stenosis and a stenotic coronary artery treated with a bypass graft, in which we virtually vary the degree of stenosis. We perform unsteady numerical simulations based on the Finite Element method using the Carreau-Yasuda model to describe the non-Newtonian blood rheology. Our results show that velocity, vorticity and wall shear stress distributions are moderately influenced by the non-Newtonian model in case of stenotic carotid arteries. On the other hand, we observed that a non-Newtonian model seems to be important in case of stenotic coronary arteries, in particular to compute the relative residence time which is greatly affected by the rheological model.