Search

Cardiac fluid dynamics fundamentally involves interactions between complex blood flows and the structural deformations of the muscular heart walls and the thin, flexible valve leaflets. There has been longstanding scientific, engineering, and medical interest in creating mathematical models of the heart that capture, explain, and predict these fluid-structure interactions. However, existing computational models that account for interactions among the blood, the actively contracting myocardium, and the cardiac valves are limited in their abilities to predict valve performance, resolve fine-scale flow features, or use realistic descriptions of tissue biomechanics. Here we introduce and benchmark a comprehensive mathematical model of cardiac fluid dynamics in the human heart. A unique feature of our model is that it incorporates biomechanically detailed descriptions of all major cardiac structures that are calibrated using tensile tests of human tissue specimens to reflect the heart's microstructure. Further, it is the first fluid-structure interaction model of the heart that provides anatomically and physiologically detailed representations of all four cardiac valves. We demonstrate that this integrative model generates physiologic dynamics, including realistic pressure-volume loops that automatically capture isovolumetric contraction and relaxation, and predicts fine-scale flow features. None of these outputs are prescribed; instead, they emerge from interactions within our comprehensive description of cardiac physiology. Such models can serve as tools for predicting the impacts of medical devices or clinical interventions. They also can serve as platforms for mechanistic studies of cardiac pathophysiology and dysfunction, including congenital defects, cardiomyopathies, and heart failure, that are difficult or impossible to perform in patients.

This paper introduces a sharp-interface approach to simulating fluid-structure interaction involving flexible bodies described by general nonlinear material models and across a broad range of mass density ratios. This new flexible-body immersed Lagrangian-Eulerian (ILE) approach incorporates the geometrical and domain solution flexibility of the immersed boundary (IB) method with an accuracy comparable to body-fitted approaches that sharply resolve flows and stresses up to the fluid-structure interface. Unlike many IB methods, our ILE formulation uses distinct momentum equations for the fluid and solid subregions with a Dirichlet-Neumann coupling strategy that connects fluid and solid subproblems through simple interface conditions. We use a penalty method involving two representations of the fluid-structure interface. These two representations are connected by approximate Lagrange multiplier forces that impose kinematic interface conditions. This approach also enables the use of multi-rate time stepping, which allows us to take different time step sizes for the fluid and structure subproblems. Our fluid solver relies on an immersed interface method for discrete surfaces to impose stress jump conditions along complex interfaces. The dynamics of the volumetric structural mesh are determined using a standard finite element approach to large-deformation nonlinear elasticity via a nearly incompressible solid mechanics formulation. This formulation also readily accommodates compressible structures for cases in which part of the solid boundary does not contact the incompressible fluid. Comparisons are made with computational and experimental benchmarks. We also demonstrate the capabilities of this methodology by applying it to model the transport and capture of a cylindrical blood clot in an inferior vena cava filter.

Reduced order models (ROMs) are computational models whose dimension is significantly lower than those obtained through classical numerical discretizations (e.g., finite element, finite difference, finite volume, or spectral methods). Thus, ROMs have been used to accelerate numerical simulations of many query problems, e.g., uncertainty quantification, control, and shape optimization. Projection-based ROMs have been particularly successful in the numerical simulation of fluid flows. In this brief survey, we summarize some recent ROM developments for the quasi-geostrophic equations (QGE) (also known as the barotropic vorticity equations), which are a simplified model for geophysical flows in which rotation plays a central role, such as wind-driven ocean circulation in mid-latitude ocean basins. Since the QGE represent a practical compromise between efficient numerical simulations of ocean flows and accurate representations of large scale ocean dynamics, these equations have often been used in the testing of new numerical methods for ocean flows. ROMs have also been tested on the QGE for various settings in order to understand their potential in efficient numerical simulations of ocean flows. In this paper, we survey the ROMs developed for the QGE in order to understand their potential in efficient numerical simulations of more complex ocean flows: We explain how classical numerical methods for the QGE are used to generate the ROM basis functions, we outline the main steps in the construction of projection-based ROMs (with a particular focus on the under-resolved regime, when the closure problem needs to be addressed), we illustrate the ROMs in the numerical simulation of the QGE for various settings, and we present several potential future research avenues in the ROM exploration of the QGE and more complex models of geophysical flows.

This paper investigates the recently introduced data-driven correction reduced order model (DDC-ROM) in the numerical simulation of the quasi-geostrophic equations. The DDC-ROM uses available data to model the correction term that is generally used to represent the missing information in low-dimensional ROMs. Physical constraints are added to the DDC-ROM to create the constrained data-driven correction reduced order model (CDDC-ROM) in order to further improve its accuracy and stability. Finally, the DDC-ROM is tested on time intervals that are longer than the time interval over which it was trained. The numerical investigation shows that, for low-dimensional ROMs, both the DDC-ROM and CDDC-ROM perform better than the standard Galerkin ROM (G-ROM) and the CDDC-ROM provides the best results.

This paper presents a conforming finite element semi-discretization of the streamfunction form of the one-layer unsteady quasi-geostrophic equations, which are a commonly used model for large-scale wind-driven ocean circulation. We derive optimal error estimates and present numerical results.