DOI: 10.1615/TSFP9
RICH FLOW PHYSICS IN CURVED ARTERIES AND THE VOCAL TRACT
ABSTRACT
Flow in the human body is primarily laminar and pulsatile. Turbulence or transitional flow plays a role in speech production and pathological flows in the circulatory system. Examples of pathological blood flow in which unsteadiness, separation and turbulence are important include regurgitant heart valves, stenoses or blockages, stents, and arterial branches and bifurcations. Speech production involves unsteady pulsatile flow and turbulent structures that affect the aeroacoustics and fluidtissue interaction. Pulsatile, unsteady phenomena, coherent vortical structures and transitional flow or turbulence occurring at low Reynolds numbers are common to these biological flows. An overarching motivation for studying cardiovascular flow and speech is to facilitate surgical planning, i.e. to enable physicians to assess the outcomes of surgical procedures by using faithful computer simulations. Such simulations are on the horizon with the advent of increasingly more powerful high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure, but they still lack many of the necessary physical models.