Lattice BGK simulations of flow in a symmetric bifurcation

Surgical planning as a treatment for vascular diseases requires fast blood flow simulations that are efficient in handling changing geometry. It is, for example, necessary to try different paths of a planned bypass and study the resulting hemodynamic flow fields before deciding the final geometrical solution. With the aid of a real time interactive simulation environment that uses an efficient flow solver, this allows flexible treatment planning. In this article, we demonstrate that the lattice Boltzmann method can be an alternative robust computational fluid dynamics technique for such kind of applications. Steady flow in a 2D symmetric bifurcation is studied and the obtained flow fields and stress tensor components are compared to those obtained by a Navier-Stokes (NS) solver. We also demonstrate that the method is fully adaptive to interactively changing geometry.