Computational comparison between Newtonian and non-Newtonian blood rheologies in stenotic vessels

This work aims at investigating the influence of non-Newtonian blood rheology on the hemodynamics of 3D patient-specific stenotic vessels, by means of a comparison of some numerical results with the Newtonian case. In particular, we consider two carotid arteries with severe stenosis and a stenotic coronary artery treated with a bypass graft, in which we virtually vary the degree of stenosis.We perform unsteady numerical simulations based on the Finite Element method using the Carreau-Yasuda model to describe the non-Newtonian blood rheology. Our results show that velocity, vorticity and wall shear stress distributions are moderately influenced by the non-Newtonian model in case of stenotic carotid arteries. On the other hand, we observed that a non-Newtonian model seems to be important in case of stenotic coronary arteries, in particular to compute the relative residence time which is greatly affected by the rheological model.