The study of living systems interacting with fluids is a difficult one characterized by the interaction of flexible elastic tissue with viscous incompressible fluid. The Immersive Boundary Method has been developed to simulate such systems.
The Immersive Boundary (IB) Method attempts to model the elastic material as a part of the fluid with additional forces due to elastic stress. The fluid equations are solved in a Lagrangian fashion on a fixed regular lattice mesh. The elastic material is tracked by following a collection of representative points as they move across the mesh. The spacial configuration of these points is used to compute elastic forces which are applied to nearby fluid points in the lattice. In general, the method is applicable to any problem in which a fluid interacts with a flexible material.
The IB method has been applied to a wide variety of problems including a beating three-dimensional heart, valve-less pumping, blood clotting, the swimming motion of fish and eels, and the inner ear.
In such problems, the immersed boundary method opens up the prospect of raw simulation, almost akin to experiment, in which something approaching the full complexity of the system is allowed to operate in the model. -- Charles S. Peskin and David M. McQueen
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