Fluid-structure interaction analysis of bioprosthetic heart valves: Significance of arterial wall deformation.

We propose a framework that combines variational immersed-boundary and arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) methods for fluid-structure interaction (FSI) simulation of a bioprosthetic heart valve implanted in an artery that is allowed to deform in the model. We find that the variational immersed-boundary method for FSI remains robust and effective for heart valve analysis when the background fluid mesh undergoes deformations corresponding to the expansion and contraction of the elastic artery. Furthermore, the computations presented in this work show that the arterial wall deformation contributes significantly to the realism of the simulation results, leading to flow rates and valve motions that more closely resemble those observed in practice.