Effects of inlet velocity profile on the hemodynamics of the abdominal aorta bifurcation

In this paper, a numerical study is conducted to investigate the influence of imposed inlet velocity profile on the hemodynamics in the region of the abdominal aorta bifurcation, for a patient specific. The influences of two different inflow velocity profiles on the hemodynamics of the abdominal aorta bifurcation have been investigated. The simulations were carried out under the same conditions changing only the shape of the inlet velocity profile in abdominal aorta. The simulations were performed with a parabolic profile (PP) and a uniform profile (UP) to quantify the hemodynamic differences between them, in the arterial regions, that is, in the upstream bifurcation, in the bifurcation and downstream bifurcation in each of the common iliac arteries. The results reported provide fundamental knowledge to a better understand of the inflow velocity profiles influence in the hemodynamics of the abdominal aorta bifurcation, such as the distribution of the velocity, pressure and wall shear stress (WSS), as well as the distribution of the stress hemodynamic descriptors on the artery wall. The results highlighted that the influence of the inlet velocity profiles in the time-averaged wall shear stress (AWSS) and relative residence time (RRT) is not significant after the abdominal aorta bifurcation. In general, for the hemodynamic descriptors studied, the correlation between the results obtained with the two velocity profiles reaches values close to 1 in the iliac arteries, in contrast to the abdominal region, where the correlation is less than 0.6.