Efficient Parallel Simulation of Atherosclerotic Plaque Formation Using Higher Order Discontinuous Galerkin Schemes

Abstract

The compact Discontinuous Galerkin 2 (CDG2) method was successfully tested for elliptic problems, scalar convection-diffusion equations and compressible Navier-Stokes equations. In this paper we use the newly developed DG method to solve a mathematical model for early stages of atherosclerotic plaque formation. Atherosclerotic plaque is mainly formed by accumulation of lipid-laden cells in the arterial walls which leads to a heart attack in case the artery is occluded or a thrombus is built through a rupture of the plaque. After describing a mathematical model and the discretization scheme, we present some benchmark tests comparing the CDG2 method to other commonly used DG methods. Furthermore, we take parallelization and higher order discretization schemes into account.