CFD Analysis for Valve-Holding Camber Permanent Inhaler Spacer (AerospaAcer) with Different Valves

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, data statistics showed that patients with respiratory problems become infected. One of the therapy techniques for the respiratory condition was the use of a metered-dose inhaler and spacer. The objective of this paper is to determine the flow parameters of three types of valves which is duckbill valve, cross slit valve and umbrella valve in inhaler spacer to compare fluid flow between valve Previous researchers chose the duckbill valve to control fluid flow in inhaler spacer. The flow characteristics are unaffected by the materials used in the new disposable inhaler spacers, such as paper and polylactic acid (PLA). Several design valves reduced the skewness below 0.94 by suppressing the fillet and chamfer. ANSYS Workbench Fluent 19.2 is used to calculate flow parameters such as turbulence kinetic energy (TKE), turbulence eddy dissipation (TED), velocity, particle velocity magnitude, streamline, and vector velocity. The setup input data is based on the previous researcher's specified parameters such as viscosity model, drug characteristics (salbutamol and propellant), discrete phase model (DPM) equal to 80, boundary condition model, and SIMPLE technique. For the three types of valves, the nozzle injection used a 0.50-millimetre dimension. The simulation work is cross-checked against the results of prior simulations. Within each iteration, the transient flow employed a time step size of 0.01 for 200 steps. The results show that computational analysis can distinguish between models of varying complexity. The TED, TKE, and velocity graphs showed the approximate value between the model geometries. Overall, the study was successful in achieving the desired velocity magnitude in terms of visual and graph representations of the various valve.