A nasal spray vaccination device based on Laval nozzle and its experimental test

Abstract

In order to realize the application of the nasal spray vaccination in the prevention and protection of respiratory infectious diseases, a nasal spray vaccination device is designed in this paper. The device uses a Laval nozzle structure to generate a high-speed airflow that impinges on the vaccine reagent and forms nebulized particles. Through optimizing of the Laval nozzle structure and testing experiments on spray particle size, spray velocity, spray angle and spray rate, a set of parameters which is applicable to actual nasal spray vaccination is obtained. The experimental results show that when the air source pressure is 2 bar, the spray angle is about 15°, the diameter of the spray particles Dv50 is about 17 μm, the volume fraction of particles with diameter smaller than 10um is about 24%, the spray rate is close to 300 μl/s. The vaccine activity tests demonstrate that under these conditions, not only the biological activity of vaccines is guaranteed, but also the delivery efficiency is well assured.