CFD Study of Transport and Deposition of Asbestos Fibers in Human Upper Tracheobronchial Airways

摘要

Fate of the inhaled asbestos fibers has attracted considerable research attention during the past few decades due to its malignant pathological response in living beings. Extensive earlier studies have been identified the links between the inhalation of asbestos and the occurrence of lung cancer; however, details of the pathological correlation are still to be uncovered. The understanding is further hampered by the lack of tools to reveal the details of motion of the asbestos fibers and their interaction with the airflow within the tracheobroncial airways. T his work is intended to investigate the transport and deposition of elongated fibers in a physiological realistic multi-level lung model using a computational modeling approach. Motions of the inhaled fibers and their interactions with the surrounding environment were reproduced by solving the system of coupled nonlinear equations governing the fibers translational and rotational motions. Correlations between the deposition pattern, fiber characteristics, breathing conditions, and airway morphology in human upper tracheobronchial airways were analyzed. The simulation results were compared with the experimental data, and good agreement was found. The carcinogenicity of these asbestos fibers was also discussed.