The inhaled air moves distally down to lung airways in process of breathing. Convection plays dominant criteria in gas mixing in conductive airways and as it moves further below diffusion starts dominating. Does entropy plays any role to optimize the gas mixing in conductive zone? Are there any available mathematical models ?
Why are you trying to use the entropy as a variable to qualify the mixing process? It is a thermodinamic state variable, you can also express a balance equation for entropy (time variation+convection+production) but I don't think that you can deduce useful information for the mixing. Production of entropy is associated to an irreversible energy transformation, e.g. kinetic into internal energy.
Dear Filippo,
In conductive airways, the gas mixing is mostly due to convection process and the nature of flow is turbulent. Hence by considering the entropy as state variable , I want to check how much work is done in process of inhalation. It may be used to verify the passiveness of exhalation process. Normal and diseased lung's P-V curves can be used to study the same.
Please correct me if I am wrong!
Bharat,
Your study reprises an old idea: that the airways are optimized to minimize the entropy generated in the mixing of inhaled air:
Wilson TA. 1967. Design of the bronchial tree. Nature; 213:668–669.
I also recommend the wide-ranging work by Hsia et al.
Lung Structure and the Intrinsic Challenges of Gas Exchange
(2016, Compr Physiol. ; 6(2): 827–895 )
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