Blood Flow Simulation in an Aorta with a mild coarctation Using Magnetic Resonance Angiography and Finite Volume Method

Abstract

Coarctation of the aorta is one of the five main congenital cardiovascular failures, accounting for 6–8 percent of these failures. This research aimed to simulate the blood flow of a seventeen-year-old male teen with a mild coarctation at one-third of his aorta's descending branch. The simulation was performed by extracting the domain and the input pulsatile velocity signal as the boundary condition at the aorta entrance using magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and the finite volume method (FVM), as well as a large eddy simulation (LES) turbulence model. The results were validated by comparing the blood flow static pressure from the numerical simulation to a clinical measurement available in the literature. The Inclusion of the turbulence model in the solution resulted in a static pressure for the heart’s normal function at the coarctation that agreed very well with the clinical measurement; the difference was just 0.39 mmHg. Therefore, the study confirmed the validity of the simulation results, the assumption that a turbulence regime exists inside an aorta with a coarctation, and the efficiency of the LES turbulence model for simulating cardiovascular flows.