Fluid structure interaction analysis of blood flow through a mechanical heart valve

Modeling pulsatile flow past heart valves remains a relatively unexplored but critical area. Due to the geometric complexity and the interaction between the flowing blood and the heart valve leaflets, existing numerical techniques that require domain discretization, such as finite element methods or finite difference techniques, cannot fully represent the moving and deforming boundaries present in an operating valve. Our aim is to develop a technique to model the flow through heart valves which includes the interaction between the blood flow and the valve leaflets using the radial functions method (RFM). The RFM is a meshless technique that fully accounts for moving and deforming surfaces and thus is well suited to model the blood flow and its interaction with leaflet motion. Here we present a 2D fluid structure interaction (FSI) model of the blood flow through a bileaflet mechanical heart valve (MHV).