Abstract
The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 causes significant respirational health problems, including high mortality rates worldwide. The deadly corona virus-containing aerosol enters the atmospheric air through sneezing, exhalation, or talking, assembling with the particulate matter, and subsequently transferring to the respiratory system. This recent outbreak illustrates that the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus-2 is deadlier for aged people than for other age groups. It is evident that the airway diameter reduces with age, and an accurate understanding of SARS aerosol transport through different elderly people's airways could potentially help the overall respiratory health assessment, which is currently lacking in the literature. This first-ever study investigates SARS COVID-2 aerosol transport in age-specific airway systems. A highly asymmetric age-specific airway model and fluent solver (ANSYS 19.2) are used for the investigation. The computational fluid dynamics measurement predicts higher SARS COVID-2 aerosol concentration in the airway wall for older adults than for younger people. The numerical study reports that the smaller SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol deposition rate in the right lung is higher than that in the left lung, and the opposite scenario occurs for the larger SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol rate. The numerical results show a fluctuating trend of pressure at different generations of the age-specific model. The findings of this study would improve the knowledge of SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol transportation to the upper airways which would thus ameliorate the targeted aerosol drug delivery system.
Highlights
The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus-2, commonly known as COVID-19 has, in late 2019, posed different challenges to different sociodemographic groups
This study considered steady laminar flow and analyzed the SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol transportation to the upper airways of an agespecific lung
SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol depositions are numerically investigated for the first time for age-specific lungs
Summary
The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus-2, commonly known as COVID-19 has, in late 2019, posed different challenges to different sociodemographic groups. Various researchers (Srivastav et al, 2013; Srivastav et al, 2014; Islam et al, 2017a; Islam et al, 2018) investigated the particle and aerosol transport to human airways, providing insight into the absorption and deposition mechanisms of inhaled drugs with a view of designing better drugs for targeted drug delivery through pulmonary routes. Amid the outbreak of COVID-19, the focus has shifted to the investigation of the transmission of SARS coronavirus-2 viruses in the form of aerosols and droplets in public places and to the respiratory tract. It is evident that the airway diameter reduces with age and a precise understanding of the SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol transport through pulmonary airways of different elderly people’s airways could potentially help in improving the overall respiratory health assessment that is lacking in the literature. The present study aims to numerically investigate the SARS coronavirus-2 aerosol transportation to an agespecific airway system for the first time
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