Evaluating the aerodynamic performance of a dry powder inhaler using cfd

Abstract

Consulta en la Biblioteca ETSI Industriales (7782)

[EN] Asthma is now the most common chronic disease in industrialised countries and its incidence has doubled over the last ten years. That is the reason why much research has been done in order to improve drug delivery. Dry powder inhalers (DPIs) have shown to be the ideal next generation aerosol drug delivery device. However, due to their patient breath-depending nature they have difficulties to dispense reproducible doses and thus, improvements on this device are still necessary in order to increase the comfort, simplicity and effectiveness of operation. Recently, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis has provided an important tool to study the mechanisms controlling powder dispersion such as air turbulence and mechanical impaction of particles. It has been proved that the built-in CFD application of Solidworks¿ known as COSMOSFloWorks¿ is a very convenient software for simulating the performance of a DPI device and how changes of the geometry of this device affected the flow field generated within the device. This study aims at evaluating and improving the performance of an Accuhaler¿ inhaler that has already being modelled with SolidWorks¿. In order to achieve that, some methods have been described to assess the dispersion efficiency of the powder generated within the device, among these methods; one of them evaluates the dispersion efficiency after simulation with CosmosFloWorks. Finally, some modifications of the inhaler geometry have been done with the subsequent evaluation of the dispersion efficiency.