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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/M84572/01
Title: THE UNSTEADY REOPENING OF COLLAPSED LUNG AIRWAYS
Principal Investigator: Jensen, Professor O
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department: Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics
Organisation: University of Cambridge
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 13 September 1999 Ends: 12 March 2000 Value (£): 8,000
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Continuum Mechanics
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
Prematurely-born infants can suffer respiratory distress because a high proportion of the airways in their lungs are collapsed and full of fluid. Artificial ventilation may be used to open these airways to establish proper gas exchange. However, when a bubble of air is blown into a collapsed, fluid-filled airway, large and potentially harmful stresses are exerted on the airway walls. Bench-top experiments indicate that the largest stresses are transient stresses that arise as the bubble begins to move into the airway. A theoretical model, which describes the propagation of a bubble into a fluid-filled, flexible-walled channel, has previously been developed to investigate steady airway reopening. This model will be extended to describe unsteady motion, so that theoretical predictions of transient stresses can be made. This will require the development of new computational techniques, which will be based around an efficient coupling of the Boundary Element Method (for computing viscous flows in deforming domains) and lubrication theory.
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Organisation Website: http://www.cam.ac.uk