Cyclic Breathing Simulations in Large-Scale Models of the Lung Airway From the Oronasal Opening to the Terminal Bronchioles

2014 ◽  
Vol 136 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Keith Walters ◽  
Greg W. Burgreen ◽  
Robert L. Hester ◽  
David S. Thompson ◽  
David M. Lavallee ◽  
...  

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed using large-scale models of the human lung airway and unsteady periodic breathing conditions. The computational domain included fully coupled representations of the orotracheal region and large conducting zone up to generation four (G4) obtained from patient-specific CT data, and the small conducting zone (to the 16th generation) obtained from a stochastically generated airway tree with statistically realistic morphological characteristics. A reduced-geometry airway model was used, in which several airway branches in each generation were truncated, and only select flow paths were retained to the 16th generation. The inlet and outlet flow boundaries corresponded to the oral opening, the physical inlet/outlet boundaries at the terminal bronchioles, and the unresolved airway boundaries created from the truncation procedure. The total flow rate was specified according to the expected ventilation pattern for a healthy adult male, which was supplied by the whole-body modeling software HumMod. The unsteady mass flow distribution at the distal boundaries was prescribed based on a preliminary steady-state simulation with an applied flow rate equal to the average flow rate during the inhalation phase of the breathing cycle. In contrast to existing studies, this approach allows fully coupled simulation of the entire conducting zone, with no need to specify distal mass flow or pressure boundary conditions a priori, and without the use of impedance or one-dimensional (1D) flow models downstream of the truncated boundaries. The results show that: (1) physiologically realistic flow is obtained in the model, in terms of cyclic mass conservation and approximately uniform pressure distribution in the distal airways; (2) the predicted alveolar pressure is in good agreement with correlated experimental data; and (3) the use of reduced-order geometry modeling allows accurate and efficient simulation of large-scale breathing lung flow, provided care is taken to use a physiologically realistic geometry and to properly address the unsteady boundary conditions.

Author(s):  
D. Keith Walters ◽  
Greg W. Burgreen ◽  
Robert L. Hester ◽  
David S. Thompson ◽  
David M. Lavallee ◽  
...  

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed for unsteady periodic breathing conditions, using large-scale models of the human lung airway. The computational domain included fully coupled representations of the orotracheal region and large conducting zone up to generation four (G4) obtained from patient-specific CT data, and the small conducting zone (to G16) obtained from a stochastically generated airway tree with statistically realistic geometrical characteristics. A reduced-order geometry was used, in which several airway branches in each generation were truncated, and only select flow paths were retained to G16. The inlet and outlet flow boundaries corresponded to the oronasal opening (superior), the inlet/outlet planes in terminal bronchioles (distal), and the unresolved airway boundaries arising from the truncation procedure (intermediate). The cyclic flow was specified according to the predicted ventilation patterns for a healthy adult male at three different activity levels, supplied by the whole-body modeling software HumMod. The CFD simulations were performed using Ansys FLUENT. The mass flow distribution at the distal boundaries was prescribed using a previously documented methodology, in which the percentage of the total flow for each boundary was first determined from a steady-state simulation with an applied flow rate equal to the average during the inhalation phase of the breathing cycle. The distal pressure boundary conditions for the steady-state simulation were set using a stochastic coupling procedure to ensure physiologically realistic flow conditions. The results show that: 1) physiologically realistic flow is obtained in the model, in terms of cyclic mass conservation and approximately uniform pressure distribution in the distal airways; 2) the predicted alveolar pressure is in good agreement with previously documented values; and 3) the use of reduced-order geometry modeling allows accurate and efficient simulation of large-scale breathing lung flow, provided care is taken to use a physiologically realistic geometry and to properly address the unsteady boundary conditions.


Author(s):  
D. Keith Walters ◽  
Greg W. Burgreen ◽  
Robert L. Hester ◽  
David S. Thompson ◽  
David M. Lavallee ◽  
...  

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed to predict the air flow in the human lung during cyclic breathing. The study employed a morphologically complex computational geometry generated using a combination of patient-specific CT-scan data for the extrathoracic and upper airway regions and a representative branching geometry for the lower airways that is available in the open literature. The geometry extended throughout the entire conducting zone and includes 16 partially resolved airway generations. For each generation beyond the third, only a fraction of the airway branches were retained, resulting in truncated flow outlets (for inspiratory flow) in generations 414. The inhalation and exhalation air flow boundary conditions were prescribed based on a physiologically realistic ventilation pattern, which was obtained using a whole-body model of human physiology. The flow was driven by specifying time-varying volumetric flowrates applied at each of the distal boundaries, while the oral boundary was maintained at constant (atmospheric) pressure. The study investigated the effectiveness of three different mass flow distribution schemes to drive the air flow. It was found that prescribed mass flow distribution fractions based on the square of the airway cross-sectional area produced the best results in terms of a uniform distal pressure distribution, while all methods produced reasonable results in terms of mass flow distribution throughout the lung airway geometry.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (9) ◽  
pp. 1413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Yao ◽  
Kwongi Lee ◽  
Minho Ha ◽  
Cheolung Cheong ◽  
Inhiug Lee

A new pump, called the hybrid airlift-jet pump, is developed by reinforcing the advantages and minimizing the demerits of airlift and jet pumps. First, a basic design of the hybrid airlift-jet pump is schematically presented. Subsequently, its performance characteristics are numerically investigated by varying the operating conditions of the airlift and jet parts in the hybrid pump. The compressible unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations, combined with the homogeneous mixture model for multiphase flow, are used as the governing equations for the two-phase flow in the hybrid pump. The pressure-based methods combined with the Pressure-Implicit with Splitting of Operators (PISO) algorithm are used as the computational fluid dynamics techniques. The validity of the present numerical methods is confirmed by comparing the predicted mass flow rate with the measured ones. In total, 18 simulation cases that are designed to represent the various operating conditions of the hybrid pump are investigated: eight of these cases belong to the operating conditions of only the jet part with different air and water inlet boundary conditions, and the remaining ten cases belong to the operating conditions of both the airlift and jet parts with different air and water inlet boundary conditions. The mass flow rate and the efficiency are compared for each case. For further investigation into the detailed flow characteristics, the pressure and velocity distributions of the mixture in a primary pipe are compared. Furthermore, a periodic fluctuation of the water flow in the mass flow rate is found and analyzed. Our results show that the performance of the jet or airlift pump can be enhanced by combining the operating principles of two pumps into the hybrid airlift-jet pump, newly proposed in the present study.


Author(s):  
Nikhil M. Rao ◽  
Cengiz Camci

An experimental study of a turbine tip desensitization method based on tip coolant injection was conducted in a large-scale rotating turbine rig. One of twenty-nine rotor blades was modified and instrumented to have a tip trench with discrete injection holes directed towards the pressure side. Time accurate absolute total pressure was measured 0.3 chord lengths downstream of the rotor exit plane using a fast response dynamic pressure sensor in a phase-locked manner. The test cases presented include results for tip gap heights of 1.40% and 0.72% of the blade height, and coolant injection rates of 0.41%, 0.52%, 0.63%, and 0.72% core mass flow rate. At a gap height of 1.40% the leakage vortex is large, occupying about 15% blade span. A reduction in gap height causes the leakage vortex to reduce in size and move towards the blade suction side. The minimum total pressure measured, for the reduced gap, in the leakage vortex is about 4% greater. Coolant injection from the tip trench is successful in filling in the total pressure defect originally resulting from the leakage vortex without injection. At the higher tip injection rates the leakage vortex is also seen to have moved towards the blade tip. The high momentum associated with the tip jets affects the total pressure distributions in the neighboring passages.


Author(s):  
Sungho Ko ◽  
Yeon-tae Kim

A numerical study was conducted to predict the performance curve of a downscaled model of the main coolant pump for a sodium-cooled fast reactor and to reduce the head loss by the optimization of the diffuser blade. The ANSYS CFX program was utilized to obtain flow characteristics inside the pump as well as the overall pressure rise across the pump operating on- and off-design points. Computational domain was divided into several blocks to achieve high grid quality effectively and 7.5 million nodes were used totally to resolve small leakage flows as well as the flow inside the rotating impeller. The corresponding experiment was conducted to validate CFD computed results. The comparison between the CFD and experimental data shows excellent agreement in terms of mass flow rate and head rise on and near design operating points. The DOE (design of experiments) and RSM (response surface method)[1] were utilized to reduce the head loss by the diffuser blade in the pump. The diffuser blade was defined as four geometric parameters for DOE. The analysis of 25 cases was made to solve the output parameters for all design points which are defined by the DOE. RSM was fitting the output parameter as a function of the input parameters using regression analysis techniques. The optimized model increased the total pump head on the design point and the low mass flow rate point, but total pump head on 130% of operating mass flow rate was reduced than the initial model.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Reza Shirzadi ◽  
Hossein Saeidi

In this article aerodynamic effects of tip clearance on a heavy duty axial turbine are studied. Three different tip clearances are considered for each rotor. For simplicity, a simple tip profile is assumed and cooling air is not modeled. Aerodynamic behavior of all stages is studied in terms of polytropic efficiency, leakage mass flow, secondary and total losses, penetration length, and total mass flow rate for different pressure ratios. Also three well established correlations of tip clearance loss are compared with CFD results to obtain the best model for performance calculation of such a large-scale turbine. The steady states, viscous and compressible flow governing equations representing the flow field with k-epsilon turbulence model are solved using commercial code ANSYS CFX.12. Useful data are presented to predict the variation of efficiency of each individual rotor, as well as entire turbine, as a function of relative tip gap (k/h). This information may be useable in design and troubleshooting. According to the results, even though pressure drop in rear stages across tip gap is lower than pressure drop in front stages, leakage mass flow rate is considerably high for this LP stages. Consequently, tip clearance losses of rear stages have significant effect on the entire turbine efficiency.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 3839-3864 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hogrefe ◽  
Peng Liu ◽  
George Pouliot ◽  
Rohit Mathur ◽  
Shawn Roselle ◽  
...  

Abstract. This study analyzes simulated regional-scale ozone burdens both near the surface and aloft, estimates process contributions to these burdens, and calculates the sensitivity of the simulated regional-scale ozone burden to several key model inputs with a particular emphasis on boundary conditions derived from hemispheric or global-scale models. The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model simulations supporting this analysis were performed over the continental US for the year 2010 within the context of the Air Quality Model Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII) and Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TF-HTAP) activities. CMAQ process analysis (PA) results highlight the dominant role of horizontal and vertical advection on the ozone burden in the mid-to-upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Vertical mixing, including mixing by convective clouds, couples fluctuations in free-tropospheric ozone to ozone in lower layers. Hypothetical bounding scenarios were performed to quantify the effects of emissions, boundary conditions, and ozone dry deposition on the simulated ozone burden. Analysis of these simulations confirms that the characterization of ozone outside the regional-scale modeling domain can have a profound impact on simulated regional-scale ozone. This was further investigated by using data from four hemispheric or global modeling systems (Chemistry – Integrated Forecasting Model (C-IFS), CMAQ extended for hemispheric applications (H-CMAQ), the Goddard Earth Observing System model coupled to chemistry (GEOS-Chem), and AM3) to derive alternate boundary conditions for the regional-scale CMAQ simulations. The regional-scale CMAQ simulations using these four different boundary conditions showed that the largest ozone abundance in the upper layers was simulated when using boundary conditions from GEOS-Chem, followed by the simulations using C-IFS, AM3, and H-CMAQ boundary conditions, consistent with the analysis of the ozone fields from the global models along the CMAQ boundaries. Using boundary conditions from AM3 yielded higher springtime ozone columns burdens in the middle and lower troposphere compared to boundary conditions from the other models. For surface ozone, the differences between the AM3-driven CMAQ simulations and the CMAQ simulations driven by other large-scale models are especially pronounced during spring and winter where they can reach more than 10 ppb for seasonal mean ozone mixing ratios and as much as 15 ppb for domain-averaged daily maximum 8 h average ozone on individual days. In contrast, the differences between the C-IFS-, GEOS-Chem-, and H-CMAQ-driven regional-scale CMAQ simulations are typically smaller. Comparing simulated surface ozone mixing ratios to observations and computing seasonal and regional model performance statistics revealed that boundary conditions can have a substantial impact on model performance. Further analysis showed that boundary conditions can affect model performance across the entire range of the observed distribution, although the impacts tend to be lower during summer and for the very highest observed percentiles. The results are discussed in the context of future model development and analysis opportunities.


2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
Santanu Chandra ◽  
Samarth S. Raut ◽  
Anirban Jana ◽  
Robert W. Biederman ◽  
Mark Doyle ◽  
...  

Rupture risk assessment of abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) by means of biomechanical analysis is a viable alternative to the traditional clinical practice of using a critical diameter for recommending elective repair. However, an accurate prediction of biomechanical parameters, such as mechanical stress, strain, and shear stress, is possible if the AAA models and boundary conditions are truly patient specific. In this work, we present a complete fluid-structure interaction (FSI) framework for patient-specific AAA passive mechanics assessment that utilizes individualized inflow and outflow boundary conditions. The purpose of the study is two-fold: (1) to develop a novel semiautomated methodology that derives velocity components from phase-contrast magnetic resonance images (PC-MRI) in the infrarenal aorta and successfully apply it as an inflow boundary condition for a patient-specific fully coupled FSI analysis and (2) to apply a one-way–coupled FSI analysis and test its efficiency compared to transient computational solid stress and fully coupled FSI analyses for the estimation of AAA biomechanical parameters. For a fully coupled FSI simulation, our results indicate that an inlet velocity profile modeled with three patient-specific velocity components and a velocity profile modeled with only the axial velocity component yield nearly identical maximum principal stress (σ1), maximum principal strain (ε1), and wall shear stress (WSS) distributions. An inlet Womersley velocity profile leads to a 5% difference in peak σ1, 3% in peak ε1, and 14% in peak WSS compared to the three-component inlet velocity profile in the fully coupled FSI analysis. The peak wall stress and strain were found to be in phase with the systolic inlet flow rate, therefore indicating the necessity to capture the patient-specific hemodynamics by means of FSI modeling. The proposed one-way–coupled FSI approach showed potential for reasonably accurate biomechanical assessment with less computational effort, leading to differences in peak σ1, ε1, and WSS of 14%, 4%, and 18%, respectively, compared to the axial component inlet velocity profile in the fully coupled FSI analysis. The transient computational solid stress approach yielded significantly higher differences in these parameters and is not recommended for accurate assessment of AAA wall passive mechanics. This work demonstrates the influence of the flow dynamics resulting from patient-specific inflow boundary conditions on AAA biomechanical assessment and describes methods to evaluate it through fully coupled and one-way–coupled fluid-structure interaction analysis.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meysam Sahafzadeh ◽  
Larry W. Kostiuk ◽  
Seth B. Dworkin

Laminar flamelets are often used to model premixed turbulent combustion. The libraries of rates of conversion from chemical to thermal enthalpies used for flamelets are typically based on counter-flow, stained laminar planar flames under steady conditions. The current research seeks further understanding of the effect of stretch on premixed flames by considering laminar flame dynamics in a cylindrically-symmetric outward radial flow geometry (i.e., inwardly propagating flame). This numerical model was designed to study the flame response when the flow and scalar fields align (i.e., no tangential strain on the flame) while the flame either expands (positive stretch) or contracts (negative stretch, which is a case that has been seldom explored) radially. The transient response of a laminar premixed flame has been investigated by applying a sinusoidal variation of mass flow rate at the inlet boundary with different frequencies to compare key characteristics of a steady unstretched flame to the dynamics of an unsteady stretched flame. An energy index (EI), which is the integration of the source term in the energy equation over all control volumes in the computational domain, was selected for the comparison. The transient response of laminar premixed flames, when subjected to positive and negative stretch, results in amplitude decrease and phase shift increase with increasing frequency. Other characteristics, such as the deviation of the EI at the mean mass flow rate between when the flame is expanding and contracting, are nonmonotonic with frequency. Also, the response of fuel lean flames is more sensitive to the frequency of the periodic stretching compared to a stoichiometric flame. An analysis to seek universality of transient flame responses across lean methane-air flames of different equivalence ratios (i.e., 1.0 to 0.7) using Damköhler Numbers (i.e., the ratio of a flow to chemical time scales) had limited success.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hogrefe ◽  
Peng Liu ◽  
George Pouliot ◽  
Rohit Mathur ◽  
Shawn Roselle ◽  
...  

Abstract. This study analyzes simulated regional-scale ozone burdens both near the surface and aloft, estimates process contributions to these burdens, and calculates the sensitivity of the simulated regional-scale ozone burden to several key model inputs with a particular emphasis on boundary conditions derived from hemispheric or global scale models. The Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model simulations supporting this analysis were performed over the continental U.S. for the year 2010 within the context of the Air Quality Model Evaluation International Initiative (AQMEII) and Task Force on Hemispheric Transport of Air Pollution (TF-HTAP) activities. CMAQ Process Analysis (PA) results highlight the dominant role of horizontal and vertical advection on the ozone burden in the mid-to-upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Vertical mixing, including mixing by convective clouds, couple fluctuations in free tropospheric ozone to ozone in lower layers. Hypothetical bounding scenarios were performed to quantify the effects of emissions, boundary conditions, and ozone dry deposition on the simulated ozone burden. Analysis of these simulations confirms that the characterization of ozone outside the regional-scale modeling domain can have a profound impact on simulated regional-scale ozone. This was further investigated by using data from four hemispheric or global modeling systems (Chemistry – Integrated Forecasting Model (C-IFS), CMAQ extended for hemispheric applications (H-CMAQ), GEOS-Chem, and AM3) to derive alternate boundary conditions for the regional-scale CMAQ simulations. The regional-scale CMAQ simulations using these four different boundary conditions showed that the largest ozone abundance in the upper layers was simulated when using boundary conditions from GEOS-Chem, followed by the simulations using C-IFS, AM3, and H-CMAQ boundary conditions, consistent with the analysis of the ozone fields from the global models along the CMAQ boundaries. Using boundary conditions from AM3 yielded higher springtime ozone columns burdens in the mid- and lower troposphere compared to boundary conditions from the other models. For surface ozone, the differences between the AM3-driven CMAQ simulations and the CMAQ simulations driven by other large-scale models are especially pronounced during spring and winter where they can reach more than 10 ppb for seasonal mean ozone mixing ratios and as much as 15 ppb for domain-averaged daily maximum 8-hr average ozone on individual days. In contrast, the differences between the C-IFS, GEOS-Chem, and H-CMAQ driven regional-scale CMAQ simulations are typically smaller. Comparing simulated surface ozone mixing ratios to observations and computing seasonal and regional model performance statistics revealed that boundary conditions can have a substantial impact on model performance. Further analysis showed that boundary conditions can affect model performance across the entire range of the observed distribution, although the impacts tend to be lower during summer and for the very highest observed percentiles. The results are discussed in the context of future model development and analysis opportunities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document