A parametric study of mucociliary transport by numerical simulations of 3D non-homogeneous mucus

Abstract Mucociliary clearance is the natural flow of the mucus which covers and protects the lung from the outer world. Pathologies, like cystic fibrosis, highly change the biological parameters of the mucus flow leading to stagnation situations and pathogens proliferation. As the lung exhibits a complex dyadic structure, in-vivo experimental study of mucociliary clearance is almost impossible and numerical simulations can bring important knowledge about this biological flow. This paper brings a detailed study of the biological parameters influence on the mucociliary clearance, in particular for pathological situations such as cystic fibrosis. Using recent suitable numerical methods, a non-homogeneous mucus flow (including non-linearities) can be simulated efficiently in 3D, allowing the identification of the meaningful parameters involved in this biological flow. Among these parameters, it is shown that the mucus viscosity, the stiffness transition between pericilliary fluid and mucus, the pericilliary fluid height as well as both cilia length and beating frequency have a great influence on the mucociliary transport.