Development of Pulsatile Flow Experiment System and PIV Measurement in an Elastic Tube

The heart diseases are one of the major causes of death in recent years. Most of them are related to the atherosclerosis of coronary artery, whereas the mechanism of atherosclerosis is still unknown and the only known is that the atherosclerosis occurs under the influence of blood flow and the wall stresses on vessel walls. In the present study, in order to obtain the information of unsteady flow in the blood vessels, the flow structures of pulsatile flows in an elastic tube modeled as a blood vessel are investigated. Firstly, to validate our PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) measurement technique, we apply it to sinusoidal flows with no net flow rate in a rigid straight tube, for which the exact solution with low Reynolds number exists. Then, two types of imitated blood flow in arteries are simulated in a rigid and an elastic straight tubes, and the results are compared together with the numerical simulation, which is also constructed in the present study, using SMAC type fractional step method with ALE (arbitrary Lagrangian and Euler) moving grids treatment. Finally, the effects of elastic boundaries on local flows as well as the wall shear stresses are discussed