Representation of Vessels — Lesson 1

In the preceding lessons, we focused on stent modeling. Now we introduce the representation of the vessel, so that later in the course we will deploy the stent into the vessel.

There are many types of systems and vessels in the human body, and as we saw stents can be deployed into many of them. But let's have a look at a typical artery.

We see the artery is made of three primary layers. While this is just an artistic rendering, it does show the mechanics of the vessel. The pulsatile loading from the heartbeat comes from the change in pressure in the vessel. This video illustrates a similar change in vessel diameter (slightly exaggerated) with some surrounding heart muscle tissue.

In this lecture, we will learn about the types of vessels, their structures, modeling techniques, mesh considerations, boundary conditions, material modeling and validation.

Lesson Video — Vessel Walk Through Workshop

The simulation files for this workshop can be found here.

• Please utilize the mm, kg, N unit system when solving the Ansys simulation models.
• Please also note that the results you obtain in these nonlinear analyses may differ slightly from those shown in the videos. Numerical round-off due to finite machine precision can be affected by the choice of the operating system, the number of cores, and the type of parallel processing (shared-memory vs. distributed-memory). Moreover, nonlinear contact and solution algorithms are often improved in each version of our software, so some changes are expected when comparing results between different releases. Thus, your results may differ slightly (within typical engineering tolerances) from the presented results, but this is to be expected for nonlinear analyses, especially for numerically unstable (e.g., underconstrained) models that may be utilized in this course.

Handout