Each year, approximately 250,000 surgical procedures are performed to repair or to replace cardiac valves [1], and of these, approximately 50,000 are aortic valve replacement operations. Despite decades of development, many of the limitations of cardiac valve prostheses remain consequences of the fluid dynamics generated by the replacement valve [1]. To enable cross-validation studies that allow for detailed comparisons of experimental and computational results, we are developing fluid-structure interaction (FSI) models of the dynamics of aortic valve prostheses mounted in a ViVitro Systems, Inc. pulse duplicator apparatus. Such an experimentally validated computational model promises both to facilitate the design of novel valve prostheses, and also to assist in the regulatory process, by providing access to detailed spatially- and temporally-resolved flow data that are challenging to obtain via experimental approaches.
Our numerical approach to FSI is based on the immersed boundary (IB) method [2]. The...
