Comparative analysis of pulsatile and steady flow on arterial mass transport

Blood flow in the cardiovascular system operates on a periodically-repeating time scale which influences flow-driven mass transport. For this reason, it is difficult to model physiological phenomena that have characteristic time scales larger than that of a pulse period. In attempt to overcome this limitation for mass transport, this study looks at reducing flow variations within a time period to a characteristic flow profile, via time averaging over the whole period. A computational model is developed to capture transient physiological flow physics, and incrementally record the flow-field for time-averaging. The calculated time-averaged flow profile, which represents the effective convective velocity in a time period, is then used as a convective vector field for scalar transport. It is shown that the time-averaged flow-field is inappropriate for deriving other flow variables such as wall shear stress, but may be used for transport purposes as a convective profile.