Towards fast hemodynamic simulations in large-scale circulatory networks

In this work, an effective numerical method specifically conceived to simulate fluid flow in networks composed by tubular domains is presented. The present contribution addresses an extension of the so-called Transversally Enriched Pipe Element Method (TEPEM) recently developed by the authors in the computational hemodynamics realm to embrace the case of branching domains. The TEPEM approach relies on a slab-based partition of the network of vessels complemented with basis functions devised to render high-order polynomial enrichment for transversal flow phenomena, while keeping a low-order polynomial approximation for the fields along the axial direction. The main goal of such an approach is to provide a fast numerical tool to characterize flow-related quantities in large-scale networks of vessels, which are of relevance in the hemodynamics field, such as the wall shear stress. Through several numerical examples ranging from academic to patient-specific networks, it is demonstrated that the proposed strategy yields reasonably accurate qualitative and quantitative results and substantially reduced computational cost when compared with standard 3D finite element models. Hence, we conclude that this approach can be regarded as an appealing numerical technology placed halfway over-simplistic cheap 1D and computationally demanding accurate 3D models. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.