Analyzing arterial blood flow by simulation of bifurcation trees

Abstract: The flow of blood in the human body is a very important component in un-derstanding a number of different ailments such as atherosclerosis and a falseaneurysm. In this thesis, we have utilized Poiseuille’s solution to Navier-Stokesequations with a Newtonian, incompressible fluid flowing laminar with zero ac-celeration in a pipe with non-flexible walls in order to study blood flow in anarterial tree. In order to study and simulate a larger arterial tree we have uti-lized a primitive building block, a bifurcation with one inlet and two outlets,joined together forming a tree. By prescribing an inlet flow and the pressureat every outlet at the bottom of the tree we have shown that we may solvethe system by fixed-point iteration, the Matlab functionfsolve, and Newton’smethod. This way of using primitive building blocks offers a flexible way to doanalysis as it makes it possible to easily change the shape of the tree as well asadding new building blocks such as a block that represents arteriosclerosis.