Around the third week after gestation in embryonic development, the human heart consists only of a valvless tube, unlike a fully developed adult heart, which is multi-chambered. At this stage in development, the heart ...

The development of fluid-structure interaction (FSI) software involves trade-offs between ease of use, generality, performance, and cost. Typically there are large learning curves when using low-level software to model the ...

We explore an embryonic heart model that couples electrophysiology and muscle-force generation to flow induced using a 2𝘋 fluid-structure interaction framework based on the immersed boundary method. The propagation of ...

Effective methods of fluid transport vary across scale. A commonly used dimensionless number for quantifying the effective scale of fluid transport is the frequency based Reynolds number, Ref, which gives the ratio of ...

Mesoscale filtering and protective layers are replete throughout the natural world. Within the body, arrays of extracellular proteins, microvilli, and cilia can act as both protective layers and mechanosensors. For example, ...

While many organisms filter feed and exchange heat or nutrients in flow, few benthic organisms also actively pulse to enhance feeding and exchange. One example is the pulsing soft coral (Alcyonacea: Xeniidae). Pulsing ...

The vertebrate heart begins to pump when its morphology is nothing more than a valveless tube, composed of an outer layer of myocardial cells surrounding an inner layer of endocardial cells. It has been proposed that the ...