COMPARISON BETWEEN THE RESULTS OF THE 2-DIMENSIONAL AND 3-DIMENSIONAL NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS IN AN AORTIC BIFURCATION MODEL

Bifurcations are vascular singularities of interest because they are the privileged sites of atherosclerosis deposits, particularly the sites corresponding to wall shear stress extrema. The purpose of this paper is to compare the two- and three-dimensional characteristics of the velocity fields, the shear stress distributions and the secondary flows in a symmetrical aortic bifurcation. The branching angle is equal to 60-degrees and the branch-to-trunk area ratio to 0.8. The numerical simulations are performed using the FIDAP programme. Although restrictive by the hypotheses of steady flow and rigid channel, with rectangular cross-sections, this study shows the importance of the three-dimensional effects in particular as far as concerned the wall shear stress behaviours.