Title: Numerical simulation of transport and deposition of micro-particles in two-phase flow in a human upper airway model from CT images

Authors: Tahereh B. Gorji; Nasser Fatouraee; Ahmad Mozaffari

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Babol University of Technology, P.O. Box 484, Babol, Iran ' Department of Biomedical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, P.O. Box 15875-4413, Tehran, Iran ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, Babol University of Technology, P.O. Box 484, Babol, Iran

Abstract: In this paper the air flow for typical inhalation rates as well as transport and deposition of particles in a realistic human upper airway model were analysed using a validated finite-volume code with user-enhanced programmes. Most important parameters affecting deposition of particles are inlet flow rate, airway geometry and geometric and physical characteristics of particles. The tubular airway model in this study consists of upper trachea-bronchial airways starting from trachea (G0) to second generation of bifurcations (G2) reconstructed from computerised tomography (CT) data of a healthy human. The low Reynolds number (LRN) k-ω turbulence model was used to simulate the laminar to turbulent occurred airflow. The results show that deposition efficiencies (DE) are typically larger during high level breathing (Qin = 60 l/min) than low-level breathing (Qin = 15 l/min) and DE is significantly larger in the right bronchial airway to the left, mainly because of the slightly greater dimensions of the right bronchial airway.

Keywords: computed tomography; CT scans; CT images; human upper airways; internal laminar-to-turbulent flow modelling; microparticle deposition; turbulence modelling; computational fluid dynamics; CFD; fluid-particle dynamics; air flow; numerical simulation; microparticle transport; microparticles; two-phase flow; finite volume method; bronchial airway; trachea.

DOI: 10.1504/IJECB.2013.056542

International Journal of Experimental and Computational Biomechanics, 2013 Vol.2 No.2, pp.171 - 188

Received: 09 Jul 2012
Accepted: 02 Jul 2013

Published online: 12 Jul 2014 *

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