COMPUTATIONAL ASPECTS OF AORTIC BIFURCATION FLOWS

Investigation of bifurcation flows is here extended to 2-dimensional regions obtained from radiographs of human aortic bifurcations. These regions were mapped onto rectangles with a slit. Wall shapes were at first approximated using cubic splines. However, the resulting wall vorticities were extremely sensitive to change in curvature, so the splines were replaced by least squares polynomial approximations. The correlations between computed wall vorticities and measured shear rates from laboratory experiments were good. These two quantities would be proportional in the same dimensionality. This suggests that useful data can be obtained from 2-dimensional calculations of 3-dimensional phenomena.