Simulation of oscillatory flow in an aortic bifurcation using FVM and FEM: A comparative study of implementation strategies

Cardiovascular diseases are one of the major causes of long‐term morbidity and mortality in human beings. The nearly epidemic increase in prevalence of such diseases poses a serious threat to public health and calls for efficient methods of diagnosis and treatment. Non‐invasive diagnostic procedures such as MRI are often used in this context; however, these are limited in terms of spatial and temporal resolution and do not provide information on time‐dependent pressures and wall shear stresses—key quantities considered to be partially responsible for the formation and development of related pathologies. The present study is concerned with the numerical simulation of oscillatory flow through the abdominal aortic bifurcation. Computational fluid dynamics simulation of oscillatory flow in a branched geometry at high Reynolds numbers poses considerable challenges. The present study reports a detailed comparison of simulations performed with a finite volume and a finite element method, two approaches with significant differences in their discretization strategy, treatment of boundary conditions and other numerical aspects. Both solvers were parallelized, using loop parallelization of the BiCGStab linear solver for the finite volume and domain decomposition based on the Schur complement method for the finite element technique. The experience gained with these two approaches for the solution of flow in a bifurcation forms the focus of this study. Although similar results were obtained for both methods, the computation time required for convergence was found to be significantly smaller for the finite element approach. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.