Tesi di LAUREA SPECIALISTICA Titolo Analisi computazionale dell'interazione fluido struttura in aorta ascendente con valvola aortica stentless Data 2013-07-23 Autore/i Orso, Emanuele Relatore Antonietti, P. Relatore Vergara, C. Correlatore Faggiano, E.; Scrofani, R. Full text non disponibile Abstract The aim of this work, is to validate through numerical computations the better performance of the biological aortic stentless valve Freedom SOLO compared to a generic stented one, as observed during several clinical studies. This study has been carried out at MOX, the laboratory of Modelling and Scientific Computing of Politecnico di Milano. In the first part of this thesis we present the clinical problem, that is the patologies that lead to the need of an aortic valve replacement. Furthermore, we describe the most important characteristics of the stentless and stented biological aortic valves. The SOLO valve is then described in further details. The rest of this thesis is organized as follows: 1. In the first part we describe the algorithm to generate a computational grid, using a collection of libraries and tools called The Vascular Modeling Toolkit (VMTK). The computational grid is created thank to several CT images, given by the department of Radiology of the Luigi Sacco hospital in Milano; 2. The computational grid is then used to run a series of numerical simulations, using the finite elements library LifeV, developed at MOX. This library is used to solve the resulting fluid structure interaction problem (FSI), where the structure represents the aortic wall and the fluid represents the blood flow. The results obtained from the simulations allow us to support the clinical conjecture. A deeper study is under investigation to demonstrate that the SOLO valve is better than the stented one. This thesis can be regarded as a first step towards the fluid dynamics simulations of stentless valves, that nowadays are quite rare in literature. We thank the medical equipe of the Luigi Sacco hospital for providing us the clinical data and for the active collaboration and scientific support.