An Investigation of Pulsatile Blood Flow in a Bifurcation Artery Using a Grid-free Method

CFD modelling is a powerful, but largely under-utilised tool for biomedical applications. In particular, it has great potential for helping us better understand the mechanisms responsible for cardiovascular disease such as artherosclerosis and thrombi formation. Flow behaviour in blood vessels has been shown to depend strongly on features of the local geometry such as branching, bending, and regions of flow constriction. The simplest blood flow models only consider steady flow. However within the circulatory system, the periodic nature of the cardiac cycle induces a pulsatile, unsteady flow. This periodic pressure perturbation is expected to have significant implications for localised flow velocities and stress distributions. We propose here a pulsatile flow model using a grid-free method, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. This method is well suited to transient flows within geometries of complex shape. The arterial geometry used here is a real carotid bifurcation derived from MRI. Rigid walls and Newtonian flow are assumed. In this paper we compare pulsatile and steady flow for this geometry.