AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Effect of Electrostatic Charge on the Deposition of Inhaled Aerosols in Infant, Child and Adult Extrathoracic Airways
Mehdi Azhdarzadeh, Jason S. Olfert, Reinhard Vehring, WARREN H. FINLAY, University of Alberta
Abstract Number: 107 Working Group: Health Related Aerosols
Abstract An in vitro study was performed to study the effect of electrostatic charge on the deposition of monodisperse uniformly charged particles in extrathoracic airways. An atomizer was designed to generate monodisperse particles all having the same charge by using controlled Plateau-Rayleigh breakup with induction charging. Experiments were conducted in adult oral-extrathoracic, child oral-extrathoracic (children aged 6-14 years), and infant nasal-extrathoracic (infants aged 3-18 months) airways.
The Alberta idealized mouth-throat, the Alberta idealized child mouth-throat, and the Alberta idealized infant nose-throat models were used to mimic the extrathoracic airways for the three aforementioned cases. Aerosol particles with aerodynamic diameters of 3-6 µm were generated, and studied at inhalation flow rates of 15-30 L/min for the adult, 10-20 L/min for the child, and 7.5-15 L/min for the infant cases, respectively. Charge per particle was controlled over the range of 0-25,000 elementary charges for the adult and 0-10,000 elementary charges for the child and infant tests.
The in vitro results showed deposition enhancement for the charged particles due to electrostatic effects. A nonlinear least squares minimization was used to develop empirical dimensionless equations to predict particle deposition in the extrathoracic airways in infants, children and adults, including electrostatic charge, flow rate, and aerodynamic diameter of the particles.