Fluid-Structure Interaction Simulation of Prosthetic Aortic Valves: Comparison between Immersed Boundary and Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian Techniques for the Mesh Representation

In recent years the role of FSI (fluid-structure interaction) simulations in the analysis of the fluid-mechanics of heart valves is becoming more and more important, being able to capture the interaction between the blood and both the surrounding biological tissues and the valve itself. When setting up an FSI simulation, several choices have to be made to select the most suitable approach for the case of interest: in particular, to simulate flexible leaflet cardiac valves, the type of discretization of the fluid domain is crucial, which can be described with an ALE (Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian) or an Eulerian formulation. The majority of the reported 3D heart valve FSI simulations are performed with the Eulerian formulation, allowing for large deformations of the domains without compromising the quality of the fluid grid. Nevertheless, it is known that the ALE-FSI approach guarantees more accurate results at the interface between the solid and the fluid. The goal of this paper is to describe the same aortic valve model in the two cases, comparing the performances of an ALE-based FSI solution and an Eulerian-based FSI approach. After a first simplified 2D case, the aortic geometry was considered in a full 3D set-up. The model was kept as similar as possible in the two settings, to better compare the simulations’ outcomes. Although for the 2D case the differences were unsubstantial, in our experience the performance of a full 3D ALE-FSI simulation was significantly limited by the technical problems and requirements inherent to the ALE formulation, mainly related to the mesh motion and deformation of the fluid domain. As a secondary outcome of this work, it is important to point out that the choice of the solver also influenced the reliability of the final results.