Towards a fluid solid interaction model of a dynamic lung

Because the pulmonary system is a site for both environmental particulate contamination, as well as drug delivery into the body, numerous research groups have focused on precisely understanding its inner-workings. Past research has demonstrated the need to realistically model the lung walls in order to accurately capture the complex airflow profile throughout all of the branches. Since this is paramount to properly replicating particulate transport in the lung, computational fluid dynamics simulations on their own are inadequate, as they cannot account for lung wall dilation. Only by coupling the fluid and solid domains can natural lung behavior can be effectively modeled.;The goal of this work was to develop and validate the methods required to create a reliable computational fluid-solid interaction pulmonary simulation. To validate the proposed technique, a balloon was both experimentally and computationally modeled. A small pulmonary system was then presented to demonstrate the simulation capabilities.