Quantitative Laryngology, Voice and Speech Research (AQL) Best Paper Award
Another interdisciplinary medicine and engineering collaboration receives award!
The Otolaryngology and Mechanical Engineering collaboration received the 10th International Conference on Advances in Quantitative Laryngology, Voice and Speech Research (AQL) Best Paper Award. Papers were judged by a multi-disciplinary award committee to have the greatest positive impact on the overall mission of AQL and were scored based on 5 criteria: Significance, Innovation, Study Design, Scholarly Potential, and Overall Impact.
The paper ” A 3D numerical simulation of wave propagation on the vocal fold surface” will be presented by Fangbao Tian (post-doc in Mechanical Engineering) as a podium presentation in Cincinnati, OH in June: http://aql2013.com/index.html
A 3D numerical simulation of wave propagation on the vocal fold surface
Fang-Bao Tian, Siyuan Chang, Haoxiang Luo, and Bernard Rousseau
Wave propagation on the vocal fold surface during phonation has been observed in clinical and physical experiments of vocal fold vibration, but it has not been well captured or studied in numerical simulations. Being able to reproduce the wave motion in a computer model would allow the vibration pattern of the vocal folds to be better analyzed for quantifying the vocal fold dynamics. In this work, we couple an immersed-boundary method and a finite-element method to compute the 3D vibration of a pair of vocal folds whose tissue is modeled as a hyperelastic material. With such a nonlinear material behavior, the simulation may incorporate large deformations of the tissue without the assumption for linear elasticity. From the 3D simulation, we observe not only wave motions in the transverse plane, i.e., along the inferior-superior and lateral directions, but also wave propagation along the longitudinal (i.e., anterior-posterior) direction in which the vocal fold model assumes a uniform cross section. Such longitudinal waves are also observed during human vocal fold vibration. The details of these observations and their implication on vocal fold dynamics will be discussed.