Plenary Lecture

Plenary 7

Wolfgang Wall (TU München): Multifield and multiscale problems and methods in computational biomechanics

Thursday, April 21, 2011, 9:15 – 10:00

Multifield and multiscale problems have received great attention from the scientific community in recent years. One reason for this is their presence in and importance for many areas in engineering as well as the applied sciences. Especially in the bioengineering / biomechanics area both multifield as well as multiscale problems are not only omnipresent but are also key for progress - both for new scientific findings and for efficient, reliable and relevant predictions.

In this talk we will cover a number of challenging biomechanical problems and we will show their inherent multifield and multiscale nature. The talk will focus on new modeling approaches as well as on the development of sound computational methods that were needed to tackle these kind of problems. Among others it will touch the respiratory system and the cardiovascular system. The most frequent multifield problem found in this context is the interaction of bioflows and soft tissue but often also other fields have to be included. And even for fluid-structure interaction new challenges had to be faced and have been met by a number of novel computational approaches. Multiple scales had to be included when bridging between the organ and the tissue level and sometimes even had to go down to the molecular scale.