Having a comprehensive understanding of the physics of blood flow is of great interest to characterize pathological flows, improve in vivo measuring techniques and implement new therapeutic procedures in clinical pratice. The main aim is to establish reference numerical data sets to validate different methods for computing energy dissipation from flow sensitized 4D Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The present study focuses on DNS of turbulent blood flow in a rigid model of thoracic aorta using OpenFOAM.
In this paper, we present the extension and validation against numerical data in a simpler geometry (Fig.1a) of OpenFOAM capabilities to perform DNS of blood flow in the thoracic aorta (Fig.1b). To achieve the most accurate simulated flow fields, a comparison is made using different temporal discretization schemes and two pressure-velocity coupling algorithms. Attention is also paid to mesh-related non-orthogonality and skewness errors and to the definition of precise near wall

Keywords: Aortic flow, Turbulence, Computational methods