An adaptive mesh refinement solver for large-scale simulation of biological flows

The observation that hemodynamic forces play an important role in the pathophysiology of the cardiovascular system has led to the need for characterizing in vivo hemodynamics on a patient-specific basis. However, the introduction of computational hemodynamics in clinical research contexts is bound to the availability of integrated workflows for analyses on large populations. Since such workflows must rely on automated geometry-driven mesh generation methods, the availability of robust solvers featuring adaptive mesh refinement strategies is essential to ensure that the approach can be adopted on a large scale. In this paper, we present an open-source solver for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations based on the libMesh finite elements library, featuring adaptive mesh refinement and parallelization. The solution scheme is a second-order velocity correction in rotational form. By presenting numerical tests on benchmark cases, we demonstrate that the coupling of this solution strategy with adaptive mesh refinement leads to a solver with good accuracy characteristics despite the relative simplicity of the scheme adopted. The availability of this solver within the Vascular Modeling Toolkit project leads to a widely available, seamless pipeline from images to simulation ready to be applied in clinical research environments.