Isogeometric fluid-structure interaction analysis with applications to arterial blood flow

A NURBS (non-uniform rational B-splines)-based isogeometric fluid-structure interaction formulation, coupling incompressible fluids with non-linear elastic solids, and allowing for large structural displacements, is developed. This methodology, encompassing a very general class of applications, is applied to problems of arterial blood flow modeling and simulation. In addition, a set of procedures enabling the construction of analysis-suitable NURBS geometries directly from patient-specific imaging data is outlined. The approach is compared with representative benchmark problems, yielding very good results. Computation of a patient-specific abdominal aorta is also performed, giving qualitative agreement with computations by other researchers using similar models.