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Hygroscopic growth of inhaled aerosols plays an important role in determining particle trajectories and hence local deposition sites. Accurate predictions of airway temperature and humidity as well as droplet-vapor interaction are critical for the calculation of hygroscopic growth. Employing a simple mouth-throat (MT) model as a computer simulation test bed, the effects of interactive heat transfer between air-droplet flow and mucus-tissue-layer have been analyzed. For a steady inhalation flow rate of 15 L/min, air temperature and relative humidity distributions affecting droplet growth, deposition efficiency (DE), and deposition pattern have been compared for different thermal airway-wall conditions. The effects considered include: (i) the latent heat of mucus-layer evaporation and convection heat transfer; (ii) convection heat transfer only; and (iii) mucus-tissue layer with constant temperature. As the most important outcome, the validated modeling results show that thermal airflow and mucus-layer interaction can significantly reduce hygroscopic growth and thereby decrease the DE of multicomponent droplets up to 10%. The modeling framework presented can be readily expanded to other systems.

Accurate predictions of the droplet transport, evolution, and deposition in human airways are critical for the quantitative analysis of the health risks due to the exposure to the airborne pollutant or virus transmission. The droplet/particle-vapor interaction, i.e., the evaporation or condensation of the multi-component droplet/particle, is one of the key mechanisms that need to be precisely modeled. Using a validated computational model, the transport, evaporation, hygroscopic growth, and deposition of multi-component droplets were simulated in a simplified airway geometry. A mucus-tissue layer is explicitly modeled in the airway geometry to describe mucus evaporation and heat transfer. Pulmonary flow and aerosol dynamics patterns associated with different inhalation flow rates are visualized and compared. Investigated variables include temperature distributions, relative humidity (RH) distributions, deposition efficiencies, droplet/particle distributions, and droplet growth ratio distributions. Numerical results indicate that the droplet/particle-vapor interaction and the heat and mass transfer of the mucus-tissue layer must be considered in the computational lung aerosol dynamics study, since they can significantly influence the precise predictions of the aerosol transport and deposition. Furthermore, the modeling framework in this study is ready to be expanded to predict transport dynamics of cough/sneeze droplets starting from their generation and transmission in the indoor environment to the deposition in the human respiratory system.

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