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In this work we study the blood dynamics in the pulmonary arteries by means of a 3D-0D geometric multiscale approach, where a detailed 3D model for the pulmonary arteries is coupled with a lumped parameters (0D) model of the cardiovascular system. We propose to investigate three strategies for the numerical solution of the 3D-0D coupled problem: the Splitting-Explicit and Implicit algorithms, where information are exchanged between 3D and 0D models at each time step at the interfaces, and the One-Way algorithm, where the 0D is solved first off-line. In our numerical experiments performed in a realistic patient-specific 3D domain with a physiologically calibrated 0D model, we discuss first the issue on instabilities that may arise when not suitable connections are considered between 3D and 0D models; second we compare the performance and accuracy of the three proposed numerical strategies. Finally, we report a comparison between a healthy and a hypertensive case, providing a preliminary result highlighting how our method could be used in future for clinical purposes.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is an important tool for the simulation of the cardiovascular function and dysfunction. Due to the complexity of the anatomy, the transitional regime of blood flow in the heart, and the strong mutual influence between the flow and the physical processes involved in the heart function, the development of accurate and efficient CFD solvers for cardiovascular flows is still a challenging task. In this paper we present life▪-cfd, an open-source CFD solver for cardiovascular simulations based on the life▪ finite element library, written in modern C++ and exploiting distributed memory parallelism. We model blood flow in both physiological and pathological conditions via the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, accounting for moving cardiac valves, moving domains, and transition-to-turbulence regimes. In this paper, we provide an overview of the underlying mathematical formulation, numerical discretization, implementation details and examples on how to use life▪-cfd. We verify the code through rigorous convergence analyses, and we show its almost ideal parallel speedup. We demonstrate the accuracy and reliability of the numerical methods implemented through a series of idealized and patient-specific vascular and cardiac simulations, in different physiological flow regimes. The life▪-cfd source code is available under the LGPLv3 license, to ensure its accessibility and transparency to the scientific community, and to facilitate collaboration and further developments. Program Title: life▪-cfd CPC Library link to program files: https://doi.org/10.17632/hzsnc3jgds.1 Developer's repository link: https://gitlab.com/lifex/lifex-cfd Licensing provisions: LGPLv3 Programming language: C++ (standard ≥17) Supplementary material: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7852088 contains the application executable in binary form, compatible with any recent enough x86-64 Linux system, assuming that glibc version ≥ 2.28 is installed. Data and parameter files necessary to replicate the test cases described in this manuscript are also available. Nature of problem: The program allows to run computational fluid dynamics simulations of cardiovascular blood flows in physiological and pathological conditions, modeled through incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, including moving cardiac valves, moving domains (such as contracting cardiac chambers) in the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian framework, and transition-to-turbulence flow. Given the scale of the typical applications, the program is designed for parallel execution. Solution method: The equations are discretized using the Finite Element method, on either tetrahedral or hexahedral meshes. The software builds on top of deal.II, implementing the mathematical models and numerical methods specific for CFD cardiovascular simulations. Parallel execution exploits the MPI paradigm. The software supports both Trilinos and PETSc as linear algebra backends. Additional comments including restrictions and unusual features: The program provides a general-purpose executable that can be used to run CFD simulations without having to access or modify the source code. The program allows to setup simulations through a user-friendly yet flexible interface, by means of readable and self-documenting parameter files. On top of that, more advanced users can modify the source code to implement more sophisticated test cases. life▪-cfd supports checkpointing, i.e. simulations can be stopped and restarted at a later time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]