Valvular heart disease has recently become an increasing public health concern due to the high prevalence of valve degeneration in aging populations. For patients with severely impacted aortic valves that require replacement, catheter-based bioprosthetic valve deployment offers a minimally invasive treatment option that eliminates many of the risks associated with surgical valve replacement. Although recent percutaneous device advancements have incorporated thinner, more flexible biological tissues to streamline safer deployment through catheters, the impact of such tissues in the complex, mechanically demanding, and highly dynamic valvular system remains poorly understood. The present work utilized a validated computational fluid–structure interaction approach to isolate the behavior of thinner, more compliant aortic valve tissues in a physiologically realistic system. This computational study identified and quantified significant leaflet flutter induced by the use of thinner tissues that initiated blood flow disturbances and oscillatory leaflet strains. The aortic flow and valvular dynamics associated with these thinner valvular tissues have not been previously identified and provide essential information that can significantly advance fundamental knowledge about the cardiac system and support future medical device innovation. Considering the risks associated with such observed flutter phenomena, including blood damage and accelerated leaflet deterioration, this study demonstrates the potentially serious impact of introducing thinner, more flexible tissues into the cardiac system.

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The objective of this work is to computationally investigate the impact of an incidence-tolerant rotor blade concept on gas turbine engine performance under off-design conditions. When a gas turbine operates at an off-design condition such as hover flight or takeoff, large-scale flow separation can occur around turbine blades, which causes performance degradation, excessive noise, and critical loss of operability. To alleviate this shortcoming, a novel concept which articulates the rotating turbine blades simultaneous with the stator vanes is explored. We use a finite-element-based moving-domain computational fluid dynamics (CFD) framework to model a single high-pressure turbine stage. The rotor speeds investigated range from 100% down to 50% of the designed condition of 44,700 rpm. This study explores the limits of rotor blade articulation angles and determines the maximal performance benefits in terms of turbine output power and adiabatic efficiency. The results show articulating rotor blades can achieve an efficiency gain of 10% at off-design conditions thereby providing critical leap-ahead design capabilities for the U.S. Army Future Vertical Lift (FVL) program.

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The computational modeling of thin-walled structures based on isogeometric analysis (IGA), non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS), and Kirchhoff-Love (KL) shell formulations has attracted significant research attention in recent years. While these methods offer numerous benefits over the traditional finite element approach, including exact representation of the geometry, naturally satisfied high-order continuity within each NURBS patch, and computationally efficient rotation-free formulations, they also present a number of challenges in modeling real-world engineering structures of considerable complexity. Specifically, these NURBS-based engineering models are usually comprised of numerous patches, with discontinuous derivatives, nonconforming discretizations, and non-watertight connections at their interfaces. Moreover, the analysis of such structures often requires the full stress and strain tensors (i.e., including the transverse normal and shear components) for subsequent failure analysis and remaining life prediction. Despite the efficiency provided by the KL shell, the formulation cannot accurately predict the response in the transverse directions due to its kinematic assumptions. In this work, a penalty-based formulation for the blended coupling of KL and continuum shells is presented. The proposed approach embraces both the computational efficiency of KL shells and the availability of the full-scale stress/strain tensors of continuum shells where needed by modeling critical structural components using continuum shells and other components using KL shells. The proposed method enforces the displacement and rotational continuities in a variational manner and is applicable to non-conforming and non-smooth interfaces. The efficacy of the developed method is demonstrated through a number of benchmark studies with a variety of analysis configurations, including linear and nonlinear analyses, matching and non-matching discretizations, and isotropic and composite materials. Finally, an aircraft horizontal stabilizer is considered to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed blended shells to real-world engineering structures of significant complexity. c