Simulation and Analyis of the Unsteady Flow within Nasal Airways
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The human nasal airways are building a very complex anatomical structure within the human head. In fact, the main airways together with their connected multiplicity of nasal cavities and sinuses are involved in the various functions of the nose. Besides warming and humidifying the inspired air, they filter out small particles and supports the olfaction process by transporting odor-bearing particles to the muscous membranes. Unfortunately, human nasal airways are often not idealy shaped leading to higher nasal flow resistance, malfunction of the smelling sense by mis-overflowing the olfactory region, fast drying soft tissue or even sleep apnea. In many cases patients are suffering from multiple nasal breathing difficulties or even limitations due to air flow blockages, hence, a septoplasty might be beneficial and could improve live quality significantly, and this is the point where numerical flow simulation (CFD) can be helpful. This work addresses this topic by using advanced CFD techniques to simulate the unsteady nasal airflow, it concentrates on a kinematic extension of flow field decomposition techniques to analyze elongational, shearing and vortical flow separately, hereto, the extended optimal triple decomposition method is applied to identify dominant oscillatory flow effects distinct by their kinematic deformation nature. Moreover, decomposed field information is used to evaluate characteristics of the nasal airway flow and to gain hints for critical on- or overflown nasal wall-tissue structures.