Modeling Arterial Walls as Composite Structures, and Their Interaction with Pulsatile Blood Flow

Abstract

We study the interaction between an incompressible, viscous fluid and a composite structure, which consists of a thin and a thick elastic layer. The thin layer is modeled using the linearly elastic shell model, while the thick layer is modeled using the equations of linear elasticity. The system is coupled via the kinematic and dynamic coupling conditions. We present an unconditionally stable, loosely-coupled numerical algorithm and show a comparison of the results obtained using the proposed algorithm to the ones obtained using a single layered structure model. This work reveals a new physical property of FSI problems involving thin interfaces with mass: the inertia of the thin fluid-structure interface regularizes solutions of the full FSI problem.