Blood flow modeling in arterial stenosis.

Arterial stenosis is a disease characterized by the buildup of a waxy substance inside the artery, which is associated with certain risks. It is difficult to eval- uate the severity of the stenosis, yet the diagnosis can become more accurate using computational fluid dynamics simulations. The present thesis introduces and applies the model of hemodynamics based on the Navier-Stokes equations, implemented in the FEniCS software employing the finite element method. The main focus lies on the prescription of the boundary condition at the outlet of the computational domain. The impact of the outlet boundary condition on medically significant quantities such as the wall shear stress is analyzed in a two- dimensional benchmark case. It appears that the right choice of the boundary condition is fundamental, in particular when vortices occur and propagate across the outlet boundary. The next part of the work is dedicated to the prescrip- tion of the outflow rate in the case of more than one outlet, corresponding to an artery branching inside the computational domain. The physically meaningful flux distribution is derived introducing Murray's law and its extension. Finally, the blood flow is simulated in a three-dimensional geometry of a patient-specific carotid artery.