modelling blood flow in arteries with starcd
 

Hi I am currently trying to model the flow of blood through the arterial human network, to calculate the blood flow rate that ends up reaching the organs. I have just started with StarCD and I am a bit lost as to know what to do and where to start. I have a laminar flow through compliant arteries and for each bifurcation, inlet and outlet i have boundary conditions for the flow rate, the pressure and the area. I was told to model the geometry with Pro engineer, but I am more concerned about modelling the flow rate (not the velocity), the change in area and applying the boundary conditions. Any help is very welcome and would be extremely helpful. Thanks a lot Sara

Re: modelling blood flow in arteries with starcd
 

you can't model compliant walls in star-cd without user coding, so I would leave that alone for the moment, and just use rigid walls. Are you making a representative model of the arterial tree with cylinders or are you using data from say an mri scan? Laminar flow is ok, but I had good results using the quadratic k-e turbulence model with hybrid wall functions. You might want to check out the following link:

http://www.cd-adapco.com/press_room/...wiftcfd.2.html

allan

Re: modelling blood flow in arteries with starcd
 

Hi, i have no experience in non-newtonian flows but I wonder could the flow rate from the heart be any different as it reaches the organs? I mean suppose the heart pumps out blood at 10L/sec, wouldn't the same flow rate reach the feet or the brain? (Compliant or non compliant just the same perhaps?)

Re: modelling blood flow in arteries with starcd
 

hi azmir well no because they are bifurcations in the arteries and part of the blood goes to the liver, part to the arms, feet, kidneys etc. That's why I am trying to model the distribution to each organ, I actually have to compare that distribution to the one we have in space (blood distribution changes in microgravity) sara

Re: modelling blood flow in arteries with starcd
 

awesome work! good luck!

Re: modelling blood flow in arteries with starcd
 

First you have to model the arterial trees using a CAD tool like pro-engineer or Solidworks. The next step consists in importing your surface model in Pro-star in order to realize the volumic mesh. Flow in artery is assumed to be laminar and most of the time newtonian (but if you are interresting in WSS distribution the newtonian assumtpion needs to be check). star-cd is suitable to model blood flow through artery but if you have no experience with numerical code, you need to start with the training cases. If you already have the CAD model, next steps are not really difficult but require lot of time. Good luck ;)