Goal-oriented mesh adaptivity for fluid-structure interaction with application to heart-valve settings

Abstract

We apply a fluid-structure interaction method to simulate prototypical dynamics of the aortic heart-valve. Our method of choice is based on a monolithic coupling scheme for fluid-structure interactions in which the fluid equations are rewritten in the 'arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian' (ALE) framework. To prevent the backflow of structure waves because of their hyperbolic nature, a damped structure equation is solved on an artificial layer that is used to prolongate the computational domain. The increased computational cost in the presence of the artificial layer is resolved by using local mesh adaption. In particular, heuristic mesh refinement techniques are compared to rigorous goal-oriented mesh adaption with the dual weighted residual (DWR) method. A version of this method is developed for stationary settings. For the nonstationary test cases the indicators are obtained by a heuristic error estimator, which has a good performance for the measurement of wall stresses. The results for prototypical problems demonstrate that heart-valve dynamics can be treated with our proposed concepts and that the DWR method performs best with respect to a certain target functional.