Computer Simulation of Pressure and Velocity Fields in Drug-Eluting Stents Using the Gridap Library
Congress: MCSUL
ABSTRACT:
Several numerical simulations of drug release from coronary drug-eluting stents were formerly performed by the authors through Matlab© and Octave to understand transport and binding mechanisms over the device/artery interface. As a continued effort, this paper is intended to reproduce results previously obtained of pressure distribution and velocity field, now employing Gridap, a Julia language-based library, able to explore different approaches of approximation Finite Element spaces, and high performance solution strategies. We compared results obtained employing diverse numerical and computational choices, such as variable mesh refinement levels, finite element interpolation order, pre-conditioner classes, and solver configurations (architecture, memory, multi-threading, etc.). The proposed benchmark problem, even addressing a relatively simple geometry and a linear differential equation, has singular regions that cause numerical difficulties, thus limiting the rate of convergence of the numerical approximations. The main contribution of the paper is to show the benefits of employing Julia as a programming language for scientific applications, and Gridap as a Finite Element library, which provided easy access to high performance resources as multi threading, parallel processing, GPU acceleration, thus great versatility in solving complex problems.