Author Archives: Daniel Duke

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About Daniel Duke

Senior Lecturer Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Monash University, Australia

From fuel injection to medical inhalers

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“Millions of people around the world rescue their health, daily, with asthma inhalers. The device is life-saving, but curiously inefficient for a technology that has been around for more than 60 years. The uneven spread and size of particles, combined with the different ways people use the inhaler, means drug delivery can often be just 25 per cent of what it should be.

Inhalers release a turbulent jet of vapour, not dissimilar to what you would see in an engine fuel injector, and in fact it’s this sideways leap in thinking that led to engineers from Australia and the US turning their engine and aerospace expertise to this medicine.”

Read more here: https://lens.monash.edu/@monash-magazine/2017/10/24/1229942/turbo-charged-medicine

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My expertise is in the scientific study of multi-phase fluid flows, and the application of advanced optical and x-ray diagnostics to these problems.

Multi-phase flows are any combination of two or more phases of matter (i.e. solid, liquid, and gas) moving together. There’s a lot we don’t yet know about how these kinds of fluid flows behave, because they are very difficult to experiment on. You can’t make a scale model of the fluid flow like you can with a car in a wind tunnel, and when you shine light through most multiphase flows, it scatters a lot, and this makes it very hard to make accurate observations. We’re addressing these challenges by developing new ways to use synchrotron x-ray light, advanced laser diagnostics, and computer models.

Understanding how multi-phase flows behave is essential to the development of technologies that we rely on every day.

To learn more, click here.