Effect of inspiration cycle and ventilation rate on heat exchange in human respiratory airways.

Abstract

A transient three dimensional (3D) theoretical axisymmetric model is developed for heat exchange across the human respiratory tract during inspiration phase and applied to study the changes in the airway temperature and velocity profile for varying ventilation rates and inhalation temperatures. A multi-compartment approach is used to study the same to avoid the airway scaling problem from micro to nano scale. This analysis also includes the role of water evaporation in mucus and non perfused tissue layers and the role of capillary bed in thermal variations during respiration. The results of heat transfer in airway and mucus layer depend on the local morphological parameters. The results are compared with the case of hypothetical regular geometry to show the significance of local morphology. The location where the inhaled air gets saturated with the body core temperature is computed to estimate the saturation distance of air. The complete analysis is made for two breathing cycles with different inhalation to exhalation ratios. The results indicate that decreasing the ventilation rate and increasing the respiration cycle can avoid the deep penetration of heat into the tract and consequently tissue thermal injury can be avoided. We have also explained numerically the role of mucus layer in avoiding tissue injury in intra-thoracic airways. We have also observed a significant difference in results for high ventilation rates between the cases of actual (cast replica) and regular airway geometry. The numerical results are in good adjustment with existing experimental data and thus validate our approach.