Determination of Navier's slip parameter using data assimilation

Abstract

One of the crucial aspects of patient-specific blood flow simulations is to specify material parameters and boundary conditions. The choice of boundary conditions can have a substantial impact on the character of the flow. While no-slip is the most popular wall boundary condition, some amount of slip, which determines how much fluid is allowed to flow along the wall, might be beneficial for better agreement with flow patterns in medical images. However, even if one assumes the simple Navier's boundary conditions on the wall, in which the relationship between tangential components of the normal traction and the velocity is linear, the determination of the specific value of the slip parameter is often difficult.

In this work, we present and test an optimal control method to estimate Navier's slip parameter on the wall and the velocity profile at the inlet using artificially generated flow domain and flow data. The results show that it is possible to recover the flow patterns and Navier's slip parameter by using sufficiently accurate discretization even from data containing a substantial amount of noise.