Deposition of nanoparticles through a cylindrical tube of human respiratory system

Abstract

This paper proposes a mathematical model for nanoparticle deposition in the respiratory bronchiole of the human lung airways. The length of the respiratory bronchiole of the human lung is 1.2 mm, and the diameter is 0.5 mm. Therefore, to investigate the impact of inhaled nanoparticles within the lung bronchioles, first, we used the Navier-Stokes equation by including the Darcy term together with Newton’s equation of motion. Then we non-dimensionalized the governing equation, and numerical solutions are obtained using the finite difference technique. Under the assumption of laminar pulsatile flow conditions and axial symmetry, the problem is simplified to a two-dimensional computational domain. The computational framework is implemented using MATLAB R2018 through user-defined code. Velocity propagation, the Reynolds number, and the Darcy number effect are performed to examine the flow conditions inside the respiratory bronchioles.