Numerical Simulation of Viscoelastic Fluid‐Structure Interaction Problems and Drug Therapy in the Eye

The vitreous is a fluid‐like viscoelastic transparent medium located in the center of the human eye and is surrounded by hyperelastic structures like the sclera, lens and iris. This naturally gives rise to a fluid‐structure interaction (FSI) problem. While the healthy vitreous is viscoelastic and described by a viscoelastic Burgers‐type equation, the aging vitreous liquefies and is therefore modeled by the Navier‐Stokes equations. We derive a monolithic variational formulation employing the arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian framework which is solved using the finite element method. To allow large 3D simulations the implementation is parallelized. Furthermore we study the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) therapy in the vitreous which is modeled by four coupled convection‐diffusion‐reaction equations with an additional coupling to the underlying flow.