Oscillatory Blood Flow in a Deformable Human Aortic Arch

The aorta is the largest artery in humans, stemming from the left ventricle of the heart and stretching down to the abdomen. It is responsible for distributing oxygenated blood to the rest of the body during each cardiac cycle. The pulsatile blood flow is complex in nature and has been previously modeled computationally in an effort to understand its effect on cardiovascular diseases and medical device design interaction [4,8–9]. However, the majority of these models either treat the vessel wall as rigid or have significantly simplified geometries, which from a physiological perspective are not true of large vessels such as the aorta. Here, the complex mechanical interaction between pulsatile blood flow and wall dynamics in the aortic arch is investigated using geometry adopted directly from CT images.Copyright © 2011 by ASME