On the importance of strong fluid-solid coupling with application to human phonation

Abstract

An advanced finite element (FE) method is presented and applied to simulate the fluid-solid-acoustic interaction in human phonation. We apply an arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) method, which allows coupling of the Eulerian fluid field with the Lagrangian mechanical field. Thereby, we investigate strong and weak (sequential staggered) coupling schemes for flow and structural mechanics. The acoustic field is computed by acoustic perturbation equations to account for convection and refraction effects of the sound in the flow region. For our application – the human phonation – we can assume a low Mach number flow and therefore use a hybrid aeroacoustic approach, which just consider a forward coupling from the flow to the acoustic field.