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Deposition of Inhaled Ultrafine Aerosols in Replicas of Nasal Airways of Infants

Experimentally measured deposition of ultrafine particles, ranging from 13–100 nm in diameter, in nasal airway replicas of ten infants aged 3–18 months is presented. The replicas included the face, nostrils, and nasal airways including the upper trachea. A differential mobility analyzer (DMA) and a condensation particle counter (CPC) were used to quantify the nasal deposition by comparing the number of polydisperse sodium chloride particles, generated by evaporation from a Collison atomizer, at the inlet and outlet of the replicas. Particles were individually classified in size by DMA and subsequently were counted one size bin at a time by CPC upstream and downstream of each replica. Since in vivo data is not available for infants to compare to, we validated our experimental procedure instead by comparing deposition in nasal airway replicas of six adults with in vivo measurements reported in literature. In the infant replicas, tidal inhalation was simulated at two physiologically compatible flow rates and the effect of flow rate on deposition was found to be small. Deposition obtained at constant flow rates is lower than with tidal breathing, indicating the importance of unsteadiness, in contrast to similar data in adults where unsteadiness is known to be unimportant. An empirical equation, containing geometrical features of the nasal airways in the form of related non-dimensional dynamical parameters (Reynolds, Schmidt, and Womersley numbers), was best fitted to the infant data. This equation may be useful for a priori prediction of nasal deposition and intersubject variability during exposure of infants to ultrafine aerosols.