Abstract
We propose the numerical simulation of respiration that treats mutual interaction between an alveolar wall and an airflow directly. The proposed model consists of two submodels. One is an alveolar model that includes an alveolar wall as mass-spring-damper, an airflow as incompressible fluid, and two-way coupling of the wall and the airflow represented by an immersed boundary method. The other is an airway model that represents an airflow in bronchus as Hagen-Poiseuille flow. The results of numerical simulation with the simplified lung model show that the proposed model has the capability to represent the influence of the distribution of the lung tissue elasticity to the respiratory volume.
