Traditional CFD Boundary Conditions Applied to Blood Analog Flow through a Patient-Specific Aortic Coarctation

Flow of a blood analog is modeled through a patient-specific aortic coarctation using ANSYS Fluent software. Details of the patient data (aortic geometry and prescribed flow conditions) were provided by the MICCAI-STACOM CFD Challenge website. The objective is to predict a blood pressure difference across the rigid coarctation under both rest and exercise (stress) conditions. The supplied STL geometry was used to create coarse and fine viscous meshes of 250K and 4.6M cells. Our CFD method employed laminar, Newtonian flow with a total pressure inlet condition and special outlet BCs derived from reconstructed flow waveforms. Analysis setup and outlet BCs were treated as a traditional non-physiological CFD problem. CFD results demonstrate that the supplied AscAo pressure waveform and flow distributions are well matched by our simulations. A non-uniform pressure gradient field is predicted across the coarctation with strong interactions with each supra-aortic vessel branch.