Mucus Transport in the Human Lung Airways: Effect of Porosity Parameter and Air Velocity

In this paper, a planar two layer steady state fluid model is proposed to study the mucus transport in the human lung airways by taking the effect of air-velocity due to air-motion and porosity parameter due to forming of porous cilia bed by certain immotile cilia by considering mucus as a visco-elastic fluid. It is shown that mucus transport increases as the pressure drop, air velocity due to air-motion increase. It is also observed that mucus transport decreases as the viscosity of serous layer fluid or that of mucus increases, but any increase in mucus viscosity at its larger values does not seem to affect the mucus transport. It is also found that for given total depth of serous layer and mucus layer, there exists a serous fluid layer thickness for which mucus transport is maximum. It is also shown that mucus transport decreases as its elastic modulus increases.