Comparative analysis of resistive immersed surface and immersed boundary methods for aortic valve simulation

Abstract

Numerical modeling of aortic valve dynamics is essential for understanding the complex fluid-structure interaction (FSI) governing valve biomechanics in health and disease. Immersed methods provide a flexible computational framework for simulating the large deformations of valve leaflets and associated blood flow without requiring body-fitted meshes. Among these approaches, the Resistive Immersed Surface (RIS) and Immersed Boundary (IB) methods are widely used. However, systematic comparative analysis of these methods for realistic aortic valve simulations has not been performed. In this work, we compare a prescribed-kinematics RIS workflow implemented in SimVascular's svMultiPhysics solver with a fully coupled IB workflow using IBAMR for trileaflet and bicuspid aortic valve configurations. The RIS method represents the valve as a surface with prescribed kinematics embedded in the fluid domain and introduces a penalty force that drives the surrounding fluid velocity toward the prescribed leaflet velocity. This formulation reduces modeling complexity and provides useful hemodynamic predictions when representative leaflet kinematics are available. In contrast, the IB method models the leaflets as elastic structures fully immersed in the fluid domain and resolves leaflet deformation through fully coupled two-way FSI. The study focuses on the extent to which RIS reproduces bulk hemodynamic features and transvalvular pressure gradients. Results show that the RIS method captures the large-scale flow structures and predicts the mean transvalvular pressure gradient with a relative error within 15% of the fully coupled IB simulation, improving to within 5% when inlet boundary conditions are matched, while reducing computational cost by approximately 60%.