Why the study?
Coaptation characteristics are crucial when assessing the competence of reconstructed aortic valves, but thin shell and membrane formulations had not been directly compared.
In computational modeling of aortic valve closure, thin shell formulations reveal that bending stiffness significantly reduces the coaptation zone compared to membrane formulations.
Coaptation characteristics are crucial in an assessment of the competence of reconstructed aortic valves. Shell or membrane formulations can be used to model the valve cusps coaptation. In this paper we compare both formulations in terms of their coaptation characteristics for the first time. Our numerical thin shell model is based on a combination of the hyperelastic nodal forces method and the rotation-free finite elements. The shell model is verified on several popular benchmarks for thin-shell analysis. The relative error with respect to reference solutions does not exceed 1–2%. We apply our numerical shell and membrane formulations to model the closure of an idealized aortic valve varying hyperelasticity models and their shear moduli. The coaptation characteristics become almost insensitive to elastic potentials and sensitive to bending stiffness, which reduces the coaptation zone.
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Vassilevski et al. (2021) studied this question.
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