Omi Dutta, Prasanjit Das
This study conducts a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis to evaluate stent performance in arterial aneurysms, focusing on the impact of Newtonian vs. non-Newtonian blood flow models, and stent design. The parameters which are used for the comparison are: pressure, velocity, wall shear stress and flow diversion. Simulations are done by using ANSYS FLUENT. There are three cases which are considered in this study: (i) Aneurysm without stent (ii) Aneurysm with a regular stent (iii) Aneurysm with a flow-diverter stent. The results show that non-Newtonian modeling yields more clinically realistic outcomes than Newtonian approximations. Because the non-Newtonian models consider the blood shear thinning effect and the viscosity changes in the artery length. The flow-diverter stent outperforms the regular stent, reducing intra-aneurysmal velocity by >99% and WSS by 98.5%, significantly lowering rupture risk. In case of Newtonian models, a regular stent allows the more of the blood to flow into the aneurysm whereas the flow diverter stent reduces more of so that it is more useful than the regular stent. But for the non-Newtonian models, the flow diverter couldn’t reduce as much flow like the case of Newtonian models. The non-Newtonian models show a more realistic blood flow simulation. In these cases, patient specific stent designs are needed for the aneurysm treatment. This research contributes to understanding the flow of blood into the artery and aneurysm both for Newtonian and non-Newtonian flow dynamics.