AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
Aerosol Deposition in Upper Respiratory Tract for Different Inhalation Patterns and Effective Flow Inlet Area: Computational Fluid Dynamics Study
MAHDI ASGARI, Arkadiusz Kuczaj, Philip Morris International R&D
Abstract Number: 292 Working Group: Aerosol Exposure
Abstract Pulmonary aerosol deposition depends on a variety of factors ranging from the complex airflow in a respiratory tract to the evolving physical and chemical aerosol properties. Although sophisticated computational aerosol transport models have improved our understanding of the aerosol inhalation in the human airways; there are still many scientific aspects to be explored. Among those, the importance of the breathing flow pattern and effective mouth flow inlet area for the aerosol transport and deposition has been emphasized with conducted in-vitro lung cast experiments. This is of particular importance for estimation of realistic aerosol doses for buccal/epithelial tissues exposed in in-vitro exposure systems.
In this computational study, we employ our Eulerian internally mixed aerosol model to predict the aerosol transport and deposition in a realistic geometry of the human upper respiratory tract. In order to capture the size dependent behavior of the polydisperse non-evolving aerosol, our model relies on the sectional discretization of the droplet size distribution function. This implementation allows us to evaluate the occurring aerosol deposition due to inertial impaction, gravitational sedimentation and diffusion. With a well resolved computational mesh near the walls, our simulation show a good agreement with the available experimental data for monodisperse aerosol transport. We investigate the impact of the breathing pattern and effective flow inlet area on the size-dependent regional aerosol deposition.