Impinging Flow as a Model for Atherosclerosis

Impinging flow in the vascular system is found at bifurcations and long curved vessels, and also in the pathological state of stenosed vessels. These are also the most prevalent regions of the vascular system for the progression of atherosclerosis. To model the in vivo vascular geometry we modified a parallel-plate flow chamber for in vitro experiments. This new impinging flow chamber recreates the local fluid streamlines of flow separation near a stagnation point in Stokes flow. We have mapped out the near wall x- and y- velocity components of this impinging flow chamber using 1.9 μm diameter fluorescent tracer beads. The near-wall flow velocity shows good agreement with the theoretical analysis of Heimenz’s solution for 2-D plane impinging flow, and with a 3-D computational fluid dynamics simulation of the model impinging flow chamber.