Abstract
An Eulerian internally mixed aerosol model is used for predictions of deposition inside a realistic cast of the human upper airways. The model, formulated in the multi-species and compressible framework, is solved using the sectional discretization of the droplet size distribution function to accurately capture size-dependent aerosol dynamics such as droplet drift, gravitational settling and diffusion. These three mechanisms are implemented in a consistent way in the model, guaranteeing that the total droplet mass as given by the droplet size distribution is always equal to the total droplet mass due to the mass concentration fields. To validate the model, we simulate monodisperse glycerol aerosol deposition inside the lung cast, for which experimental data is available. Provided that an adequate computational mesh is used and an adequate boundary treatment for the inertial deposition velocity, excellent agreement is found with the experimental data. Finally, we study the size-dependent deposition inside the lung cast for a polydisperse aerosol with droplet sizes ranging from the nanometer scale to beyond the micrometer scale. The typical ‘V-shape’ deposition curve is recovered. The aim of this paper is to 1) provide an overview of the Eulerian aerosol dynamics model and method, to 2) validate this method in a relevant complex lung geometry and to 3) explore the capabilities of the method by simulating polydisperse aerosol deposition.
Highlights
Aerosol research plays a major role in various branches of science and engineering
Synergy of both experimental and computational approaches is required in order to foster deeper understanding of transport, evolution and dynamics of aerosols during inhalation
In the right figure a close-up is shown of the branching geometry as used in the experiment, where it can be clearly seen that the cast is built up of 32 segments, constructed to explicitly distinguish the geometrical features of the airways
Summary
Aerosol research plays a major role in various branches of science and engineering These branches concern environmental and atmospheric problems (weather, pollution, indoor air quality), engineering applications linked with sprays (combustion or cooling) or inhalation-related challenges (medical devices and dosimetry). Synergy of both experimental and computational approaches is required in order to foster deeper understanding of transport, evolution and dynamics of aerosols during inhalation. Experiments give insight into the physical processes and can provide essential information to build confidence in computational models. These models often need simplifications and heuristic input to become computationally feasible. With the further maturing of computational modeling, high levels of detail may be Nomenclature
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