Direct numerical simulation of physiological pulsatile flow through a stenotic channel

In this paper, direct numerical simulation (DNS) is used to simulate the physiological pulsatile flow in a constricted channel to gain insight into the transition-to-turbulent flow in an artificial arterial stenosis. An in-house code has been developed using OpenMP and DNS was performed based on available high performance shared memory parallel computing facilities. The Womersley number tested was fixed to 10.5 and the Reynolds number was varied from 800 to 1800 in the simulation. The physical characteristics of the flow field have been thoroughly analyzed in terms of the mean streamwise velocity, the root mean square (RMS) velocities, turbulence kinetic energy (TKE), viscous wall shear stresses and wall pressure.