A numerical simulation of unsteady blood flow through multi-irregular arterial stenoses

An unsteady mathematical model to study the characteristics of blood flowing through an arterial segment in the presence of a couple of stenoses with surface irregularities is developed. The flow is treated to be axisymmetric, with an outline of the stenoses obtained from a three dimensional casting of a mildly stenosed artery I 11, so that the flow effectively becomes two-dimensional. The governing equations of motion accompanied by appropriate choice of boundary and initial conditions are solved numerically by MAC (Marker and Cell) method in cylindrical polar coordinate system in staggered grids and checked numerical stability with desired degree of accuracy. The pressure-Poisson equation has been solved by successive-over-relaxation (SOR) method and the pressure-velocity correction formulae have been derived. The flexibility of the arterial wall has also been accounted for in the present investigation. Further, in-depth study in the flow pattern reveals that the separation Reynolds number for the multi-irregular stenoses is lower than those for cosine-shaped stenoses and a long single irregular stenosis. The present results predict the excess pressure drop across the cosine stenoses than the irregular ones and show quite consistency with several existing results in the literature which substantiate sufficiently to validate the applicability of the model under consideration. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.