A sensitivity analysis of CFD simulations of aerosols produced by metered dose inhalers in valved holding chamber

DE CHARRAS YL; RAMIREZ RIGO MV; BERTIN DE

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 11th World Congress of Chemical Engineering; 2023

Asociación Argentina de Ingenieros Químicos

Valved Holding Chambers (VHCs) are medical devices that improve the efficiency of inhalation therapy when using pressurized metered-dose inhalers, since they modify the aerodynamic particle size distribution of the aerosol inhaled by the patient. However, the flow of the emitted aerosol is multiphasic and is influenced by many factors. Therefore, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be a valuable tool providing complementary information essential to assess, understand and evaluate the potential and performance of VHCs. The coupling of CFD and the discrete particle model (DPM) allows to simulate multiphase flows and has been widely used. However, this approach is based on many sub- models and parameters, the influence of which is not always clear. The objective of this work was to carry out a sensitivity analysis to determine how various submodels or parameters (relevant in MDI-VHC system) impact the simulation result. For this, a cylindrical VHC available for therapeutics was simulated using the Ansys Fluent 19.1 software.