A Computational Study on the Effect of Bifurcation Lesions with Different Structures on Blood Velocity and Temperature

Abstract

Treating coronary bifurcation stenosis is still a challenging task. Existing procedures still display a relatively small rate of success. This paper aims to investigate numerically the effect of bifurcation lesions with different structures on the dynamics of blood flow and related temperature. The problem geometry is parametrically varied by changing the bifurcation angle and radius. A finite volume method is used to simulate the three-dimensional flow. The effects induced by the structure of the stenosis, the artery bifurcation angle and radius, and the inlet velocity of blood are discussed in terms of flow pattern, pressure distribution, and shear stress at the blood wall. The heat transfer from the solid tissue is also determined for different stenosis configurations. The present study has been conducted with the explicit intention to generate useful data for the development of methods curing the vascular stenosis with thermal ablation.