A fictitious domain method for simulating viscous flow in a constricted elastic tube subject to a uniform external pressure

Stenosis of vascular type is an abnormal narrowing in a blood vessel. It is a common cause of some cardiovascular illnesses, such as stroke. A nonlinear mathematical model with a free moving boundary is used to model axisymmetric elastic tube with constriction subjected to a uniform external pressure and a prescribed pressure drop. A distributed Lagrange multiplier based fictitious domain method combined with operator splitting techniques and finite element method has been developed to simulate viscous incompressible flow in the above channel. The motion of the free moving tube wall is obtained by a prediction relaxation technique. Numerical results and convergence studies are presented in this paper. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.