Improvement of cardiovascular stent design through advanced numerical simulation

The project aims to demonstrate the capability of advanced numerical simulation based on Finite Element modelling to investigate transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) designs, deployment geometries and the stent’s capacity to be loaded and unloaded. Numerical simulation appears as a cheap option to study the devices' behaviour and the different factors that may influence it. In this study, it is proposed as a support and guidance for the design process. The focus is given to the assessment of the loading capacity of the stent into the device, deployment of the stent and interactions with the deployment device. These studies require large computational models which are also highly non-linear. In that sense, high performance computing can help to reduce computational time and increase the number of cases to study without increasing expensive experimental setup. The objective of this study is to provide a tool to simulate TAVI behaviour and help the SME to optimise the design in the future. In particular, this project aims at investigating how different modelling strategies in terms of material model, geometric properties and discretisation procedures can impact analysis results. In order to do so the Alya code, developed at Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is adapted to perform the simulations. This project has been developed as collaboration between LVD Biotech and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) within the SHAPE programme of PRACE