The department of Mechanics at the Université catholique de Louvain is accepting applications for a PhD or post-doc position in the context of the NHEMO project (numerical hemodynamics).
The NHEMO project is a joint project of the biomechanical group at UCL and the Department of Vascular Surgery at the University Hospital St-Luc. Its research activities are aimed at:
* modeling the flow of biological fluids, more especially blood in large vessels and also air in the respiratory tracts, both in normal and pathological states
* developing and analyzing efficient, robust and reliable numerical methods for the simulation of such flows.
* developing simulation software to guide medical decisions and to design more efficient medical devices.
The research will focus on efficient fluid-structure interaction models for cardiovascular and respiratory simulations. Indeed, fluid-structure coupling occurs both in the circulatory and the respiratory systems. Most of the time, the fluid-structure interaction problem involves a coupling between the 3D Navier-Stokes equations and a 3D non-linear structure in large displacement. In the context of physiological systems, this coupling procedure is complex for several reasons: (1) the displacement of the wall cannot be supposed to be infinitesimal, geometric non-linearities are therefor present in the structure and the fluid problem has to be solved in a moving domain (2) in case of the cardiovascular system, the densities of the artery walls and the blood being close, the coupling is strong and has to be tackled very carefully (implicitly) to avoid numerical instabilities, (3) naïve boundary conditions on the artificial boundaries induce spurious reflection phenomena.
Because of the above mentioned difficulties, the interaction between the flow and the structure are often neglected or is considered only for a small portion of the cardiovascular or respiratory system since the computational cost of such a fully coupled procedure is still very expensive.
The aim of this work is to focus on more efficient fluid-structure interaction algorithms such as a coupling between the 3D Navier-Stokes equations and a 1D structure model or a MRI dynamic geometric model.
The applicant work within the developed codes and with a dynamic interdisciplinary team.
The position will be mentored by Emilie Marchandise, professor of Biomechanics and Jean-François Remacle, Professor of Civil Engineering. The work will take place at the Applied Mechanics Division at UCL: http://www.uclouvain.be/mema.
The candidate should have a solid background in numerical methods and simulation. He should have a genuine interest in nonlinear fluid/solid mechanics, constitutive modeling. In order to better understand the physiological problems, interest in the human physiology is welcome to consider the specific modeling challenges of cardiovascular and respiratory systems. It is anticipated that the successful candidate will start by January of 2010, with an immediate start being preferred.
Send resume : Prof. Emilie Marchandise , Prof. Jean-Francois Remacle
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