A comparative study of different nonlinear hyperelastic isotropic arterial wall models in patient-specific vascular flow simulations in the aortic arch

15/2012

A comparative study of different nonlinear hyperelastic isotropic arterial wall models in patient-specific vascular flow simulations in the aortic arch

Sunday 11th March 2012

Mengaldo, G.; Tricerri, P.; Crosetto,P.; Deparis, S.; Nobile, F.; Formaggia, L.

Blood flow in major arteries gives rise to a complex fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem. The mechanical behaviour of the tissues composing the vessel wall is highly nonlinear. However, when the wall deformation is small it can be argued that the effect of the non-linearities to the flow field is small and indeed several authors employ a linear constitutive law. In the aortic arch, however, the deformations experienced by the vessel wall during the heart beat are substantial. In this work we have implemented different non-linear constitutive relations for the vessel wall. We compare the flow field and related quantities such as wall shear stress obtained on an anatomically realistic geometry of aortic arch reconstructed from clinical images and using physiological data. Particular attention is also devoted to the efficiency of the algorithms employed. The fluid-structure interaction problem is solved with a fully coupled approach and using the exact Jacobians for each different structural model to guarantee a second order convergence of the Newton method.

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Mathematical Modelling and Numerical Analysis