A numerical study of the gas and particle dynamics in a needle free drug delivery device

In recent times, a unique drug delivery system known as transdermal drug delivery has been developed which can deliver drug to the human skin without using any external needle. A shock tube system is used to generate a moving shock wave which flows through the tube. The idea is to accelerate particles behind the moving shock so that it can attain sufficient momentum to penetrate the outer layer of the skin (stratum corneum) and have a pharmaceutical effect. The important issue while delivering drug to the skin is to deliver it with uniform velocity and spatial distribution. Among different tried and tested systems the contoured shock tube (CST) seems to fulfill this requirement successfully. This paper focuses on numerically investigating the flow field and analyzing the gas and particle interaction through the contoured shock tube. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been used to simulate and further analyze the flow field. The important issues regarding the flow field and the gas particle interaction are discussed in details.