COMPUTATIONAL ASPECTS OF MUCUS PROPULSION BY CILIATED EPITHELIUM

Robin Chatelin (1) , Philippe Poncet (2) , Mayya Tokman

1 IMT - Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse UMR5219
2 LMAP - Laboratoire de Mathématiques et de leurs Applications [Pau]

This work is focused on the investigation of the mechanical dysfunction and airway clearance efficiency (or lack thereof) of the respiratory system by a quantitative analysis of mucus motion. We perform three-dimensional numerical simulations of the mucus and the ciliated cells present at lung walls (epithelium). In this preliminary work we consider a simplified configuration where the fluid is assumed to be Newtonian, the air/mucus interface is flat, and density and viscosity are constant. We formulate equations describing the simplified configuration, which are also relevant in the general context, and solve this system numerically to obtain mucus motion over a full cilia cycle. The stability condition of the explicit time integrators for the set of equations is prohibitively restrictive on the size of the integration time step. In order to begin development of effective numerical strategies for this problem we construct a one-dimensional model equation that contains the numerical challenges of a more general system. We study performance of several implicit and exponential time integrators using the model equation and use the results of the comparison to outline promising strategies for building efficient time integrators for a more complex system.

Mots clés: Epithelium ciliated cells; lung mucus; numerical analysis; scientific computing

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation; Analyse numérique [math.NA]

Robin Chatelin, Philippe Poncet, Mayya Tokman. COMPUTATIONAL ASPECTS OF MUCUS PROPULSION BY CILIATED EPITHELIUM. 2nd European Conference on Microfluidics, Dec 2010, Toulouse, France. ⟨hal-02011153⟩