Frontiers in Mathematical Biology

Capturing both radial and longitudinal displacement of viscoelastic arteries interacting with blood flow

Martina Bukac

University of Houston

Recent in vivo studies have identified significant longitudinal arterial wall displacement over the cardiac cycle. Existing computational studies that use thin structure approximations of arterial walls are limited to elastic models that capture only radial wall displacement.
Motivated by these findings, we model the fluid-structure interaction(FSI) in blood flow where arterial walls are modeled by a linearly viscoelastic Koiter shell model capturing both radial and arterial wall displacements. The resulting, fully coupled FSI problem is solved using an improved version of our recently developed unconditionally stable, loosely coupled partitioned scheme. Numerical results are compared to in vivo measurements of the common carotid artery wall motion, showing excellent agreement.