Ex Vivo and in Silico Study of Human Common Carotid Arteries Pressure Response in Physiological and Inverted State

Arterial walls are a multilayer structures with nonlinear material characteristics. Furthermore, residual stresses exist in unloaded state (zero-pressure condition) and they affect arterial behavior. To investigate these phenomena a number of theoretical and numerical studies were performed, however no experimental validation was proposed and realized yet. We cannot get rid of residual stresses without damaging the arterial segment. In this paper we propose a novel experiment to validate a numerical model of artery with residual stresses. The inspiration for our study originates from experiments made by Dobrin on dogs’ arteries (1999). We applied the idea of turning the artery inside out. After such an operation the sequence of layer is reversed and the residual stresses are re-ordered. We performed several pressure-inflation tests on human Common Carotid Arteries (CCA) in normal and inverted configurations. The nonlinear responses of arterial behavior were obtained and compared to the numerical model. Computer simulations were carried out using the commercial software which applied the finite element method (FEM). Then, these results were discussed.