Impact of sleeping position, gravitational force & effective tissue stiffness on obstructive sleep apnoea.

Accurate prediction of deformation and collapse of the upper airway during breathing is required for effective and personalised treatment of obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). While numerical modelling techniques such as fluid-structure interaction (FSI) are promising, an outstanding challenge is to accurately predict the deformation of the airway during breathing and thus the occurrence of OSA. These difficulties arise because the effective stiffness of the soft tissue in the human upper airway varies due to neuromuscular effects on the stiffness of the underlying muscles.

Fully coupled fluid-electro-mechanical model of the human heart for supercomputers.

In this work, we present a fully coupled fluid-electro-mechanical model of a 50th percentile human heart. The model is implemented on Alya, the BSC multi-physics parallel code, capable of running efficiently in supercomputers. Blood in the cardiac cavities is modeled by the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) scheme.