EnginSoft - Conference Abstracts

EnginSoft Users' Meeting 2007
Le Tecnologie CAE nell'Industria

Stress analysis of carotid arterial stenosis with 3-D Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulations

Fabbri G. - Brunel Institute for Bioengineering - ENDIF
Long Q. - Brunel Institute for Bioengineering
Gao H. - Brunel Institute for Bioengineering
Koenig C.S. - Brunel Institute for Bioengineering
Collins M.W. - School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University
Pinelli M. - ENDIF Engineering Department in Ferrara, University of Ferrara
Cenci G. - ENDIF Engineering Department in Ferrara, University of Ferrara

Abstract

Artherosclerotic plaques may rupture without warning and cause subsequential acute syndromes such as myocardial infarction and cerebral stroke. Plaque disruption tends to occur at point where the plaque surface is weakest i.e. at points where biomechanical stresses caused by the pulsatile blood flow are concentrated. Therefore, both plaque disruption. The former predisposes the plaque to rupture while the latter may precipitate it.

The present study is to analyze the stress distributions on arterial plaque with various degrees of stenosis in human carotid bifurcations. For that, a fully coupled fluid-strucutre interaction (FSI) simulation approach was adopted to provide the fluid field inside the arteries, the stress and the displacement information on the arterial wall. The bidirectional iterative coupling between computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA) was made through the commercial software ANSYS 11.0, where the structural part of the analysis was solved using ANSYS Multiphysics and the fluid part using ANSYS CFX.