Analysis of drag effects on pulsatile blood flow in a right coronary artery by using Eulerian multiphase model

The influence of the presence of neighboring entities on drag in blood flow where the dominating mechanisms are expected to be viscous, drag, and gravity forces is investigated in a 3-D anatomically realistic right coronary artery. A classical Eulerian multiphase model on the Fluent v6.3.26 platform is used to model pulsatile non-Newtonian blood flow. Two new drag models based on the mixture viscosity concept are developed by using the drag similarity criteria. In literature, drag models based on the mixture viscosity concept are only depended on volume fraction and show Newtonian viscosity effects on drag. However, mixture viscosity depends on the primary independent variables such as the volume fraction and the shear rate in most of the dispersed flows like blood flow. Non-Newtonian drag effects on red blood cell are so calculated by using these new volume fraction and the shear rate dependent drag models. Five different drag models including these new drag models are used to model the blood flow in this study to investigate the effectiveness of drag force model on blood flow.