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Gabriele Dini Ciacci
The state of the art for computational studies of the airflow in the human nose does not emphasize the importance of defining a criterion to compare different anatomies. Often comparisons are carried out by imposing the same pressure difference between the external ambient and a point typically located in the region of the larynx. In alternative, many studies compare at the same flow rate. The two approaches clearly lead to different results. This has a crucial importance for multi-patient studies, which are essential in the field given the extreme variability of the anatomy of the human nose. Moreover, a particularly significant comparison is often performed to computationally evaluate the effects of a particular surgery, hence comparing pre-operatory with post-operatory states.
In this work, we follow up on a fundamental research effort related to turbulent flows in the idealized geometry of the plane Poiseuille flow, and extend it to the context of nasal airflow. Two anatomies of the same patient corresponding to a pre-op and post-op states (the latter obtained by virtual surgery) are compared under the two different conditions. Results show that the differences between prescribed constant pressure difference and prescribed constant volumetric flow rate are significant, at the level of both global quantities and mean flow field.