  A temporal homogenization approach for the numerical simulation of
atherosclerotic plaque growth is extended to fully coupled fluid-structure
interaction (FSI) simulations. The numerical results indicate that the
two-scale approach yields significantly different results compared to a simple
heuristic averaging, where only stationary long-scale FSI problems are solved,
confirming the importance of incorporating stress variations on small
time-scales. In the homogenization approach, a periodic fine-scale problem,
which is periodic with respect to the heart beat, has to be solved for each
long-scale time step. Even if no exact initial conditions are available,
periodicity can be achieved within only 2-3 heart beats by simple
time-stepping.
