Committee Chair

Ranjan, Reetesh

Committee Member

Sreenivas, Kidambi; Margraves, Charles

Department

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Aerosolized drug delivery in human airways is typically used for the treatment of several pulmonary diseases. In this study, large-eddy simulation (LES) is used for the numerical investigation of the airflow and the aerosol deposition characteristics within the upper human airways. LES is performed using the Eulerian-Lagrangian framework where the airflow is modeled using the Eulerian formulation, and the aerosol evolution is tracked in a Lagrangian manner under the dilute suspension conditions using a one-way coupled approach. First, computational framework is assessed in terms of the prediction of the mean flow statistics and the aerosol deposition and comparing with the past experimental and numerical results. Afterward, the effects of inflow Reynolds number (Re) and particle size (d_p) on the deposition fraction (D_F) are examined. The study shows that the effect of Re on D_F is apparent for d_p>5 μm and D_f increases with an increase in d_p.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dr. Reetesh Ranjan, for his encouragement, invaluable supervision, patience, and guidance throughout this research. I am also grateful to Dr. Kidambi Sreenivas and Dr. Charles Margraves for agreeing to be on my thesis committee and for their constant support. I am thankful to the members of the Fluids and Combustion Modeling group, namely, Eli Durant, Jash Doshi, Jamie Bowers, for their help and often having a fruitful discussion on problems of common interest. I would like to express a deep gratitude to Dr. Prakash Damshala, for his exceptional guidance and support during my graduate study. The administrative staff of UTC College of Engineering and Computer Science were always very cooperative. I express my thanks to these staff members. In particular, I appreciate the cooperation and support of Andrea James for her guidance and help at various stages of my graduate study. I appreciate and acknowledge the support of the Biomedical Research Initiation Collaborative (BRIC) grant from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) for funding this project. Finally, I want to thank SimCenter at UTC for the computational resources and technical support.

Degree

M. S.; A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Science.

Date

5-2021

Subject

Airway (Medicine); Mathematical models

Keyword

LES; Eulerian-Lagrangian; human-airways.

Document Type

Masters theses

DCMI Type

Text

Extent

xiii, 62 leaves

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Download

Share

COinS