Fluid-structure coupled CFD simulation of the left ventricular flow during filling phase

The fluid-structure coupled simulation of the heart, though at its developing stage, has shown great prospect in heart function investigations and clinical applications. The purpose of this paper is to verify a commercial software based fluid-structure interaction scheme for the left ventricular filling. The scheme applies the finite volume method to discretize the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations for the fluid while using the nonlinear finite element method to model the structure. The coupling of the fluid and structure is implemented by combining the fluid and structure equations as a unified system and solving it simultaneously at every time step. The left ventricular filling flow in a three-dimensional ellipsoidal thin-wall model geometry of the human heart is simulated, based on a prescribed time-varying Young's modulus. The coupling converges smoothly though the deformation is very large. The pressure-volume relation of the model ventricle, the spatial and temporal distributions of pressure, transient velocity vectors as well as vortex patterns are analyzed, and they agree qualitatively and quantitatively well with the existing data. This preliminary study has verified the feasibility of the scheme and shown the possibility to simulate the left ventricular flow in a more realistic way by adding a myocardial constitutive law into the model and using a more realistic heart geometry.