Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-1-2026

Comments

This article is the author’s final published version in American Journal of Physiology - Heart and Circulatory Physiology, Volume 331, issue 1, 2026, Pages H301-H317.

The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1152/ajpheart.00016.2026. Copyright © 2026 The Authors.

 

Abstract

The assumption that blood adheres to vessel walls with zero tangential velocity component, the so-called "no-slip" boundary condition, is a foundational premise of cardiovascular fluid dynamics. Whether the no-slip condition holds in vivo, however, remains unknown. Seven healthy adult volunteers underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging. With four-dimensional flow magnetic resonance imaging of the descending thoracic aorta and modeling blood as a Navier-Stokes fluid, near-wall blood velocities were quantified, and wall shear stress was calculated based on the measured velocity fields. Within the Navier-Stokes data assimilation framework, tangential wall velocities of ∼30-80% of the mean luminal velocity were consistently obtained. These results provide evidence for effective macroscopic slip behavior at the aortic wall in vivo. Consequently, wall shear stresses were substantially reduced compared with values obtained under the assumption of no-slip. This finding challenges the universal use of the classical no-slip boundary condition in macroscopic cardiovascular flow modeling and directly affects key blood flow characteristics such as pressure drop, vorticity, wall shear stress, and energy dissipation, which play important roles in both normal and disease-state cardiovascular conditions.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Language

English

PubMed ID

42228951

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Cardiology Commons

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