Zhou, X; Zackon, D; Marquardt, T; (2024) Fluid viscosity versus solid damping in a cochlear FEM. In: AIP Conference Proceedings. (pp. 060007). AIP Publishing: Helsingør, Denmark.

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Abstract

For reasons of computational efficiency, most cochlear models simulate power dissipation solely by damping inside the solid cochlear partition, disregarding viscous dissipation in the fluid. In recent years, however, simulation incorporating fluid viscosity became reasonably affordable. In this study, we compared the effect of both types of power dissipation using a passive 3D box model implemented in the commercial finite-element modelling (FEM) package COMSOL. Indeed, memory requirements and computation time was approximately 10 time larger when simulating fluid viscosity compared to solid damping only. But the qualitative difference was striking: As expected, when lowering the solid damping in a model without fluid viscosity, the peak of the travelling wave (TW) got higher, moved apically and the apical slope of the TW got much shallower. (I.e., the distance over which the wave amplitude decayed increased substantially.) When lowering the fluid viscosity in a model without solid damping, the peak of the TW also got higher and moved apically, but the slope of decay remained constant. The slope of approximately 30 dB/mm was much steeper than could be achieved with solid damping and compares to the more than 100-dB/octave slopes at the high-frequency side of experimentally measured frequency tuning curves. We conclude that that solid damping cannot replace the computation of viscous dissipation when intending to simulate the sharp TW decay. They have qualitatively different effects.

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