The physics of fluid flow in the human body is governed in many cases by the complex interactions between the fluid and its surrounding structure. Detailed understanding of these interactions will of course greatly aid surgical procedures and the design of medical implants.
The majority of numerical modelling techniques currently used ignore these complex interactions and simulate either the fluid flow or structural deformation only using Computational Fluid Dynamics or Finite Element Methods.
The University of Greenwich has been very active in the area of multi-physics numerical modelling for a number of years. A particular application, funded by EPSRC, has looked at modelling the fluid-structure interaction taking place in pulsating blood flow in an artery, which includes non-newtonian and visco-elastic effects.
The presentation will discuss latest advances into numerical modelling techniques and associated software for large scale multi-physics problems. The need to exploit high performance parallel computing architectures with suitable simulation software will also be discussed.