A pulsatile 3D flow relevant to thoracic hemodynamics: CFD - 4D MRI comparison

Application Challenge AC7-04 © copyright ERCOFTAC 2021

CFD Simulations

Overview of CFD Simulation

Large Eddy Simulations were carried out using the in-house, massively parallel and multiphysics YALES2BIO solver based on YALES2 [4] developed at CORIA (Rouen, France). YALES2BIO is dedicated to the simulation of blood flows at the macroscopic and microscopic scales. The base is a solver for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The equations are discretised using a finite-volume fourth-order scheme, adapted to unstructured meshes [5,6]. The divergence-free property of the velocity field is ensured thanks to the projection method introduced by Chorin [7]. The velocity field is first advanced in time using a low-storage fourth-order Runge-Kutta scheme [6,8] in a prediction step. This predicted field is then corrected by a pressure gradient, obtained by solving a Poisson equation to calculate pressure. This equation is solved with the Deflated Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient algorithm [9]. YALES2BIO was validated and successfully used in many configurations relevant to cardiovascular biomechanics (see [10] for a list of publications). The boundary conditions applied at the inlet came from the data acquired during the experiment (2D cine PC-MRI).