Fluid dynamics of an idealized left ventricle: the extended Nitsche’s method for the treatment of heart valves as mixed time varying boundary conditions

Keywords

Advanced Numerical Methods for Scientific Computing
Computational Medicine for the Cardiocirculatory System
SC4I/Digitization, Innovation, and Competitiveness of the Production System
Code:
61/2015
Title:
Fluid dynamics of an idealized left ventricle: the extended Nitsche’s method for the treatment of heart valves as mixed time varying boundary conditions
Date:
Saturday 21st November 2015
Author(s):
Tagliabue, A.; Dedè, L.; Quarteroni, A.
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Abstract:
In this work, we study the blood flow dynamics in idealized left ventricles (LV) of the human heart modelled by the Navier-Stokes equations with mixed time varying boundary conditions (BCs). The latter are introduced for simulating the functioning of the aortic and mitral valves. Based on the extended Nitsche’s method firstly presented in [Juntunen and Stenberg, Mathematics of Computation, 2009], we propose a formulation allowing an efficient and straightforward numerical treatment of the opening and closing phases of the heart valves which are associated to different kind of BCs, namely natural and essential. Moreover, our formulation includes terms preventing the numerical instabilities associated to backflow divergence, i.e. nonphysical reinflow at the valves. We present and discuss numerical results for the LV obtained by means of Isogeometric Analysis for the spatial approximation with the aim of both analysing the formulation and showing the effectiveness of the approach. In particular, we show that the formulation allows to reproduce meaningful results even in idealized LV.
This report, or a modified version of it, has been also submitted to, or published on
International Journal for Numerical Methods in Fluids