FLUID FLOW AND THERMAL ANALYSIS OF BLOOD FLOW IN AN AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED 2D VASCULAR NETWORK FEATURING THE POROUS MEDIA-BASED OUTFLOW BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

Blood flow and thermal analyses in biological tissues are utterly important to better understand the transport phenomena in human tissues with reference to cardiovascular diseases, drug delivery, and thermal ablation. In the existing literature, there is room for new computationally lighter numerical analyses, including both fluid flow and heat transfer. This paper presents an analysis of blood thermo-fluid dynamics within an automatically generated two-dimensional (2D) vascular network, employing the constrained constructive optimization algorithm for structure generation, the porous media assumption for outflow boundary conditions, and heat transfer coefficient analysis for terminal vessels. Through comparisons with theoretical results, the model demonstrates mathematical robustness. Results of the simulations show that blood velocity decreases with increasing number of bifurcations, offering quantitative insights into its decay in magnitude and on its impact on heat transfer. Blood temperature rises in vessels with low velocity, hindering its cooling effects in the surrounding tissues. The study highlights the influence of bifurcation levels on heat transfer coefficient reduction, suggesting longer pathways and time periods to reach high temperature within the blood vessels, due to the cooling effect of pulsating blood flow in larger vessels. The quantitative analysis of the heat transfer coefficient and Nusselt number provides insights into heat transfer between blood and the surrounding tissue, offering also valuable information for numerical bioheat models in thermal therapy simulations.