Fluid/Acoustic/Structure Interaction in Biomedical Research

Numerical simulations of the upper airway breathing can provide better understanding of the role of anatomy, tissue properties, breathing conditions and other parameters that influence the pharyngeal collapse in sleep apnea patients. Computational studies can also evaluate non-invasively, the outcomes of different surgical procedures prior to surgery. However, the majority of published studies use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to compute the airflow, ignoring the airway’s wall compliance. The objective of the present work is to employ Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI), to accurately predict the interaction between airway wall movement and the resulting changes in the airflow distribution in subject specific, anatomically accurate, airway geometries for different breathing conditions and with the soft tissue mechanical properties estimated from Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging. Bio: