Parallel CFD simulation of flow in a 3D model of vibrating human vocal folds

Accurate computation of highly unsteady and massively separated airflow in human vocal folds during phonation, which is fundamental for the Understanding and modeling of the aeroacoustic processes involved in human voice production, requires CFD simulations on large 3D dynamic meshes. This work presents a 3D model of flow past vibrating vocal folds solved by cell-centered finite volume method, verification of the solver on a benchmark cylinder cross-flow problem, grid dependence study and parallel scalability results obtained on a heterogeneous Linux computational cluster with 12 Intel Xeon dual-processor dual-core and 17 AMD Opteron dual-processor single-core nodes. Transient computations on dynamic meshes with up to 3.2 M elements were performed on two geometries modeling convergent and divergent glottis with an angle of 20 degrees. In the results, the jet deflection angle, flow rate, glottal velocity and pressure, drag and lift force and jet contours (including phase-averaged data) are compared for these two configurations. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.