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Simulation of the FDA idealized medical device


The need for reliable approaches in numerical simulations stands out as a critical issue for the development and optimization of cardiovascular biomedical devices. This led the US Food and Drug Administration to undertake a programme of validation of computational fluid dynamics methods for transitional and turbulent flows. In the current investigation, large-eddy simulation is used to simulate the flow in the first benchmark medical device, and results are confronted to the existing laboratory experiments. This idealized medical device has the particularity to feature transition to turbulence after a sudden expansion. Thanks to the high-performance computing capabilities of YALES2BIO, we could perform a parametric study of the effects of numerical parameters on the results. These indicate a considerable impact of numerical aspects on the prediction of the location of the transition to turbulence. The study also demonstrates that injecting small perturbations at the inflow greatly improves the streamwise velocity estimation in the transition region and substantially contributes to the robustness of the flow statistical data.

Velocity fields withi the FDA medical device. The location of the transition to turbulence strongly depends on numerical parameters if a proper treament of the inlet boundary condition is not applied.

This numerical study was performed during the post-doctoral stay of Vladeta Zmijanovic in the YALES2BIO group. More details can be found in Zmijanovic et al., IJNMBE, 33(1), 2016.