Deposition of submicron charged particles in turbulent pipe flow with an application to the trachea

Abstract

The paper presents a study of the deposition of submicron charged spherical particles caused by convection, Brownian and turbulent diffusion in a pipe with a smooth wall and with a cartilaginous ring wall structure. The model is supposed to describe deposition of charged particles in generation 0 (trachea) of the human respiratory airways. The flow is modeled with a SST-Turbulence model combined with a convective-diffusion equation including electric field migration for the particles, and Poisson's equation for the determination of the electrostatic potential in terms of the space-charge density of the particles. An approximate analytical solution is derived for the case of a smooth pipe which is used to verify the numerical solutions obtained from using the commercial software Comsol Multiphysics. Numerical results of deposition rates are also provided for the case of a pipe with a cartilaginous ring wall structure.