Analysis of finite element and finite volume methods for fluid-structure interaction simulation of blood flow in a real stenosed artery

This paper presents a qualitative and quantitative comparison between the finite element and the finite volume methods for the fluid-structure interaction simulation of blood flow through a real stenosed artery. The artery geometry corresponds to a severely stenosed (around 75% lumen reduction) portion of the brachiocephalic trunk, located immediately upstream of the bifurcation of this vessel into the right subclavian and right common carotid arteries. The patient-specific geometry was segmented from medical images of a computerized tomography scanner from an individual with the subclavian steal syndrome. Doppler ultrasound velocity measurements were used to determine and impose patient-specific boundary conditions. The numerical simulations were performed in commercial software, Ansys and COMSOL, with a comparative second order discretization for the pressure, velocity and displacement variables. The results of this research disclosed a reasonable overall agreement between the predicted hemodynamics for both approaches. The finite volume method software (Ansys) proved to be more efficient in computational time and memory requirements.This work was developed in the aim of the doctoral grant SFRH/BD/144431/2019, and the projects UIDB/04436/2020, UIDB/04077/2020, funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Also, this work was partially funded by Junta de Extremadura through grant GR18175 (partially financed by FEDER)