Sunday, 3rd October, 2010, 15h - 16h

Multimodel description of the human lungs (workshop on multiscale simulations - 2nd Barcelona School on Biomedical Informatics)

The respiratory system realizes the transfer of oxygen from the outside air to the alveolar membrane, through which it diffuses onto the blood. As pure diffusion is far from being sufficient to realize that transfer, most of it is of advective type, and this advection is triggered by inflation-deflation cycles of the paremchyma.
The mechanical part of the lungs can then be seen as a tree-like domain (conducting airways) embedded in an elastic medium. The flow in the upper part is inertial (incompressible Navier-Stokes equations), whereas inertia can be neglected for deeper branches (Stokes equations), which allows to use Poiseuille’s law for each branch, and consequently Darcy like equations on the corresponding subtrees. We aim at addressing the delicate issues in terms of theory, numerics, and modelling, raised by the coupling of those models (Navier-Stokes, Darcy equations on a network, elasticity equations).

Speaker: Bertrand Maury(Université Paris Sud)

Room PRBB Auditorium