Non-Newtonian blood flow around healthy and regurgitated aortic valve with coronary blood flow involved

Abstract

Most numerical simulations about aortic valve are discussing about the blood flow through prosthetic valves, therefore this study covers a biological aortic valve. In this paper the simulation of blood flow around the regurgitated valve as well as around the health valve have been investigated and is showing how the regurgitation affects the heart function and coronary blood flow. Furthermore it also covers the coronary blood flow and its affect on the blood motion around the valve and consequently on the possible calcification. The physical problem has been treated for the period of closed valve, because of the regurgitation, which occurs at that time. For this restriction the assumption of non-elastic geometry has been used. Also the non-Newtonian Power Law model for the blood rheology has been used; because of the regions of slowly moving blood. Results are showing that the coronary blood flow does not have a high impact on the blood motion and thus the calcification is more probable as well that the regurgitation has a strong affect on the heart function, like aortic pressure drop, increased left ventricle volume, etc. The calcification reason has also been stated, but needs some further investigation. This paper covers in detail the geometry of computational domain and physics, so the results can be easily repeated. © 2012 Journal of Mechanical Engineering. All rights reserved.