Efficient fluid-structure interaction models for cardiovascular and respiratory simulations (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium)

General description
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The department of Mechanics at the Université catholique de Louvain is accepting applications for a PhD or post-doc position in the context of the NHEMO project (numerical hemodynamics).
The NHEMO project is a joint project of the biomechanical group at UCL and the Department of Vascular Surgery at the University Hospital St-Luc. Its research activities are aimed at:
* modeling the flow of biological fluids, more especially blood in large vessels and also air in the respiratory tracts, both in normal and pathological states
* developing and analyzing efficient, robust and reliable numerical methods for the simulation of such flows
* developing simulation software to guide medical decisions and to design more efficient medical devices.

PhD project
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The research will focus on efficient fluid-structure interaction models for cardiovascular and respiratory simulations. Indeed, fluid-structure coupling occurs both in the circulatory and the respiratory systems. Most of the time, the fluid-structure interaction problem involves a coupling between the 3D Navier-Stokes equations and a 3D non-linear structure in large displacement. In the context of physiological systems, this coupling procedure is complex for several reasons: (1) the displacement of the wall cannot be supposed to be infinitesimal, geometric non-linearities are therefor present in the structure and the fluid problem has to be solved in a moving domain (2) in case of the cardiovascular system, the densities of the artery walls and the blood being close, the coupling is strong and has to be tackled very carefully (implicitly) to avoid numerical instabilities, (3) naïve boundary conditions on the artificial boundaries induce spurious reflection phenomena.

Because of the above mentioned difficulties, the interaction between the flow and the structure are often neglected or is considered only for a small portion of the cardiovascular or respiratory system since the computational cost of such a fully coupled procedure is still very expensive.

The aim of this work is to focus on more efficient fluid-structure interaction algorithms  such as a coupling between the 3D Navier-Stokes equations and a 1D structure model or a MRI dynamic geometric model. 

The applicant work within the developed codes and with a dynamic interdisciplinary team.

The position will be mentored by Emilie Marchandise, professor of Biomechanics. The work will take place at the Applied Mechanics Division at UCL: http://www.uclouvain.be/mema.

To apply: Please send your application by email including your Curriculum Vitae, list of three persons for reference, a list of publications, and a cover letter stating your motivation to:

Professor Emilie Marchandise
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL)
Ecole polytechnique de Louvain (EPL)
Department of Mechanics (MECA)
Avenue G. Lemaître, 4
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Mail: emilie.marchandise@uclouvain.be

The research objective of the Applied Mechanics Division is the theoretical prediction of the behaviour of solids and fluids, with the help of new mathematical modeling and computer simulation techniques. Applications concern new materials and their forming processes. The main research topics are :

• Fluid mechanics (polymers, foams, suspensions, turbulence)
• Solid mechanics (composites materials, damage mechanics)
• Simulation of industrial processes (extrusion, injection moulding, crystal growth)
• Numerical methods (finite element methods, adaptive methods, stochastic methods)
• Algorithms for scientific computations (parallel computing)