A Critical Analysis of the CFD-DEM Simulation of Pharmaceutical Aerosols Deposition in Upper Intra-Thoracic Airways: Considerations on Aerosol Transport and Deposition.

The reliability and accuracy of numerical models and computer simulations to study aerosol deposition in the human respiratory system is investigated for a patient-specific tracheobronchial tree geometry. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model coupled with discrete elements methods (DEM) is used to predict the transport and deposition of the aerosol. The results are compared to experimental and numerical data available in the literature to study and quantify the impact of the modeling parameters and numerical assumptions.