A Mini Guide on Mesh Generation of Blood Vessels for CFD Applications

This work presents two topics relevant for mesh generation of blood vessels. Given a surface triangle mesh of the exterior part of a blood vessel, a short guide on meshing the inlets and outlets is provided. Namely, the open-source tool Gmsh is used to generate unstructured triangle and quadrilateral meshes, given a polyline description of a two-dimensional inlet or outlet. On the other hand, generating a three-dimensional mesh from the input surface mesh, suitable for fluid flow simulations, remains an open question. A small review of relevant methods for structured hexahedral meshing is provided, alongside arguments why they are in some cases preferred to the unstructured meshing approaches.