A partitioned strongly coupled fluid-structure interaction method to model heart valve dynamics

A new method for the calculation of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) of highly flexible bodies is presented. This innovative algorithm demonstrates the strong coupling of a commercial computational fluid dynamics code with an in-house coded structural solver. The strong response of the pressure distribution to the displacement can be approximated by a reduced order model for the fluid solver. The Jacobian of this reduced order model is then used in the structural solver to obtain a stable and full implicit iteration scheme. The method is demonstrated on a 2D model of a flexible aortic valve during the cardiac cycle. Furthermore, the model is able to calculate shear stresses on the leaflet. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.