Nasal Airflow CFD for Deviated Septum

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Nasal Airflow CFD for Deviated Septum

ISEF Category: Biomedical Engineering

Ready to Turn This Idea Into a Real Project?

This guide was put together with the help of AI research tools to give you a solid starting point. But a competitive science fair project lives in the details: refining your research question, fine-tuning your variables, analyzing your data, and presenting your findings like a seasoned scientist.

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Subcategory: Biomechanics  ·  Difficulty: Advanced  ·  Setup: Home Setup  ·  Time: 1 to 2 Months

The Hook

A deviated septum makes one nostril feel blocked even when you can still breathe. Surgeons cut and straighten the cartilage to fix it. CFD lets you visualize that airflow before any scalpel touches a patient. Public CT scans plus OpenFOAM means a high schooler can run the same simulation a clinic does.

What Is It?

The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) and other public archives host CT scans with structural views of nasal cavities. After downloading a scan, you segment the airway in free software like 3D Slicer to produce a 3D mesh.

OpenFOAM is a free CFD solver. You import the mesh, define inlet and outlet boundaries, set air properties, and run a steady or transient simulation. The output includes velocity, pressure, and wall shear stress maps.

Wall shear stress correlates with subjective congestion in published studies. By comparing simulations across different septal deviations, you predict which patients would notice the difference most.

Why This Is a Good Topic

Patient-specific CFD is real clinical research. The tooling is free, the data is public, and the variable is anatomically meaningful. You will learn medical-image segmentation, CFD setup, and clinical validation.

Research Questions

  • How does deviation angle change peak wall shear stress?
  • What is the effect of inlet flow rate on the shear distribution?
  • Does mesh refinement converge at a usable element count?
  • To what extent does turbinate size shift the airflow path?
  • Which deviation severity crosses published congestion thresholds?
  • How does temperature of inlet air affect velocity?
  • What is the effect of breathing cycle frequency on time-averaged shear?

Basic Materials

  • Laptop with at least 16 GB RAM.
  • Public CT scans from TCIA.
  • OpenFOAM installation (Linux or WSL).
  • 3D Slicer for segmentation.
  • Free meshing tools like Gmsh.

Advanced Materials

  • Workstation with 32 GB+ RAM.
  • ANSYS or COMSOL educational license.
  • Lab access to a respiratory simulator.
  • Clinical mentor for patient-data interpretation.

Software & Tools

  • OpenFOAM: Runs the CFD solver.
  • 3D Slicer: Segments nasal cavity from CT.
  • ParaView: Visualizes simulation results.
  • Python (PyVista): Automates mesh and post-processing.

Experiment Steps

  1. Lock the segmentation protocol so every nasal cavity is reconstructed the same way.
  2. Run a mesh-convergence study on one geometry before any parameter sweep.
  3. Decide your boundary conditions and document them.
  4. Plan a sanity-check control (straight-tube geometry) with a known analytical solution.
  5. Run patient cases and report shear summary statistics.
  6. Compare predicted shear maps to published patient-reported scores.

Common Pitfalls

  • Skipping mesh convergence and trusting a single simulation.
  • Using a sharp-edged airway from segmentation, which causes solver blowup.
  • Treating laminar flow as a given when the regime is transitional.
  • Ignoring boundary-condition mismatch between literature and simulation.
  • Reporting only one patient and claiming a general result.

What Makes This Competitive

A competitive entry uses at least five patient geometries, runs both steady and pulsatile breathing cycles, reports mesh-convergence studies, and benchmarks predicted shear values against published patient-reported nasal obstruction scores. Sensitivity analysis on inlet flow rate adds robustness.

Project Variations

  • Add a saline-spray-deposition model on top of the airflow.
  • Compare CPAP-pressurized vs. spontaneous breathing.
  • Use machine learning to predict shear from geometry features alone.

Learn More

  • OpenFOAM tutorials: Free documentation and case files.
  • 3D Slicer documentation: Free segmentation tutorials.
  • PubMed: Search nasal airflow CFD obstruction reviews.
  • TCIA: Open imaging archive for nasal CT data.
  • MIT OpenCourseWare: Course 2.25 Advanced Fluid Mechanics.
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