Abstract
Bronchial asthma is a kind of chronic bronchitis. It causes the airway narrowing happen and so makes breathing difficult. Generally, airway has many folds into the airway lumen on buckling, but thickening airway wall in asthmatic airway decreases folds. Besides, discharged airway mucus in asthmatic airway is much and thick, so it is caused to airway obstruction by retention of mucus. In this study, to clarify the mechanism for re-opening on occluded airway, we tried to visualize tube cross-section and a re-opening process using a collapsible tube applied silicone oil as a model of an airway with an airway mucus. The tube was applied a rapid transmural pressure change. As a result, a model with oil took longer time until re-opening than that without oil and re-opening time became shorter with increasing in buckling mode number.
