Endotracheal Tubes Design: The Role of Tube Bending

Abstract

Endotracheal tubes (ETT) passed inside the human trachea witness tube bending at different angles, affecting the local fluid flow dynamics. This induces a variable mechanical ventilation performance across patients’ comfortability levels. Our understanding of the local fluid flow dynamics phenomena is thus crucial to enhance the maneuverability of ETT under operation. For the first time to our knowledge, we shed light on ETT through computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate the bending effect of ETT on the local airflow in volume-controlled mechanical ventilation. We considered an ETT with 180° arc bend configuration, including Murphy’s eye. We identified several flow phenomena associated with the bending, such as flow asymmetries, secondary flows, and vortex dynamics throughout the tube.