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Flow around a cylinder has been extensively studied due to its practical importance in engineering, much attention has been devoted to drag reduction and vortex shedding suppression using active and passive control devices. A strong motivation for studying such a practical problem come from the fact that large amplitude of lift fluctuation and alternate vortex shedding are generally design concerns for engineers. Several numerical and experimental studies have been devoted for studying flow around a cylinder with a flexible plate attached to its centerline. This investigation has been known to be one of the most successful ways of controlling vortex shedding. Other active device for vortex shedding cycle reduction in order to minimize sound pressure is a cylinder equipped with hairy flaps. Experimental studies of air around a cylinder equipped with hairy flaps show that hairy flaps can reduce the wake deficit by modifying the shedding cycle behind the cylinder. For the model and simulation of such a coupling problem, fluid structure capabilities need to be performed. Fluid structure coupling problems can be solved using different solvers; a monolithic solver and a partitioned process. Monolithic process is a fully implicit method preserving energy at the fluid structure interface. However, its implementation is more complex when specific methods are required for both fluid and structure solvers. When efficient fluid and structure software packages are available, a partitioned procedure can be used in order to couple the two codes. The present work is devoted to simulation of fluid structure interaction problems and flow around thin flexible hairy flaps, using a partitioned procedure. One of the main problems encountered in the simulation is the automatic remeshing when the flaps come into contact and the fluid mesh between the flaps undergoes high mesh distortion. In this paper, numerical simulation has been performed and Strouhal number for two different Reynolds number Re=1.46 104 and 1.89 104 have been investigated. For both Reynolds number experimental data is available. For comparison with flow around a plain cylinder, numerical simulation was also performed and Strouhal number compared to experimental value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Valvular heart diseases (such as stenosis and regurgitation) are recognized as a rapidly growing cause of global deaths and major contributors to disability. The most effective treatment for these pathologies is the replacement of the natural valve with a prosthetic one. Our work considers an innovative design for prosthetic aortic valves that combines the reliability and durability of artificial valves with the flexibility of tissue valves. It consists of a rigid support and three polymer leaflets which can be cut from an extruded flat sheet, and is referred to hereafter as the Wheatley aortic valve (WAV). As a first step towards the understanding of the mechanical behavior of the WAV, we report here on the implementation of a numerical model built with the ICFD multi-physics solver of the LS-DYNA software. The model is calibrated and validated using data from a basic pulsatile-flow experiment in a water-filled straight tube. Sensitivity to model parameters (contact parameters, mesh size, etc.) and to design parameters (height, material constants) is studied. The numerical data allow us to describe the leaflet motion and the liquid flow in great detail, and to investigate the possible failure modes in cases of unfavorable operational conditions (in particular, if the leaflet height is inadequate). In future work the numerical model developed here will be used to assess the thrombogenic properties of the valve under physiological conditions., (© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Spatial discretization of complex imaging- derived fluid-solid geometries, such as the cardiac environment, is a critical but often overlooked challenge in biomechanical computations. This is particularly true in problems with Lagrangian interfaces, where the fluid and solid phases share a common interface geometrically. For simplicity and better accuracy, it is also highly desirable for the two phases to have a matching surface mesh at the interface between them. We outline a method for solving this problem, and illustrate the approach with a 3D fluid-solid mesh of the mouse heart. An MRI dataset of a perfusion-fixed mouse heart with 50 microm isotropic resolution was semi-automatically segmented using a customized multimaterial connected-threshold approach that divided the volume into non-overlapping regions of blood, tissue, and background. Subsequently a multimaterial marching cubes algorithm was applied to the segmented data to produce two detailed, compatible isosurfaces, one for blood and one for tissue. Both isosurfaces were simultaneously smoothed with a multimaterial smoothing algorithm that exactly conserves the volume for each phase. Using these two isosurfaces, we developed and applied novel automated meshing algorithms to generate anisotropic hybrid meshes on arbitrary biological geometries with the number of layers and the desired element anisotropy for each phase as the only input parameters. Since our meshes adapt to the local feature sizes and include boundary layer prisms, they are more efficient and accurate than non-adaptive, isotropic meshes, and the fluid-structure interaction computations will tend to have relative error equilibrated over the whole mesh.

The remodeling that occurs after a posterolateral myocardial infarction can alter mitral valve function by creating conformational abnormalities in the mitral annulus and in the posteromedial papillary muscle, leading to mitral regurgitation (MR). It is generally assumed that this remodeling is caused by a volume load and is mediated by an increase in diastolic wall stress. Thus, mitral regurgitation can be both the cause and effect of an abnormal cardiac stress environment. Computational modeling of ischemic MR and its surgical correction is attractive because it enables an examination of whether a given intervention addresses the correction of regurgitation (fluid-flow) at the cost of abnormal tissue stress. This is significant because the negative effects of an increased wall stress due to the intervention will only be evident over time. However, a meaningful fluid-structure interaction model of the left heart is not trivial; it requires a careful characterization of the in-vivo cardiac geometry, tissue parameterization though inverse analysis, a robust coupled solver that handles collapsing Lagrangian interfaces, automatic grid-generation algorithms that are capable of accurately discretizing the cardiac geometry, innovations in image analysis, competent and efficient constitutive models and an understanding of the spatial organization of tissue microstructure. In this manuscript, we profile our work toward a comprehensive fluid-structure interaction model of the left heart by reviewing our early work, presenting our current work and laying out our future work in four broad categories: data collection, geometry, fluid-structure interaction and validation.