AN EMBEDDED SURFACE METHOD FOR VALVE SIMULATION. APPLICATION TO STENOTIC AORTIC VALVE ESTIMATION

This work deals with the modelling and the simulation of a moving rigid valve in a blood flow. We consider a fluid-structure coupling between an unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes system for the fluid, and an ODE for the structure with a rotation angle as only degree of freedom. The kinematic constraint on the fluid-structure interface is enforced via a Lagrange multiplier. A fictitious domain approach allows us to use a fixed grid for the fluid domain, and also to easily consider large valve displacements. We present numerical results and we discuss clinical indexes used to characterize aortic valve stenosis.