An immersed-boundary method for flow-structure interaction in biological systems with application to phonation.

Area of Science:

• Computational fluid dynamics
• Solid mechanics
• Biophysics

Background:

• Flow-structure interaction (FSI) is crucial in biological systems.
• Modeling FSI in biological contexts, such as phonation, presents significant computational challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a new numerical approach for modeling FSI problems in biological systems.
• To couple existing fluid flow solvers with a novel solid mechanics solver.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a sharp-interface, immersed-boundary method for incompressible fluid flow.
• Developed a new sharp-interface Cartesian grid, immersed boundary method for linear viscoelasticity governing solids.
• Coupled the fluid and solid solvers for FSI modeling.
• Validated the solid mechanics solver with a canonical problem.

Main Results:

• The coupled solver demonstrated simple grid generation and efficient computation on structured grids.
• Applied the methodology to model laryngeal aerodynamics and vocal fold vibration.
• Performed 3D eigen analysis for a multi-layered vocal fold prototype.
• Simulated 2D flow-induced vocal fold vibration in a modeled larynx.

Conclusions:

• The developed coupled solver is effective for modeling biological FSI problems.
• The approach provides insights into laryngeal aerodynamics and vocal fold dynamics during phonation.