Study of a Pressurized Metered-dose Inhaler Spray Parameters in Fluent™

The objective of this paper is to help fulfill the lack of information about the parameters needed to simulate a pressurized metered-dose inhaler (pMDI) spray (using a commercial computational fluid dynamics tool), providing future researchers the necessary information to study other pMDIs related devices, such as holding chambers. Following a previous bibliographic research about the characteristics of a pMDI spray, a further compilation was needed regarding the information to computationally define the spray in Fluent (TM). A very common drug asthma treatment (Ventolin (R)) was used in this study, with particles diameters going from 1.22 mu m to 49.5 gm in a Rosin-Rammler distribution. The parameters were tested in Fluent (TM) (v6.3.26), using a three-dimensional "testbox" created especially for this purpose and meshed using the Gambit (TM) software (v2.2.30). The results showed that the selected parameters have produced a simulated spray very similar to the real one. It was also observed that the air behavior inside the "testbox" had a predictable response.