Pharyngeal flow simulations during sibilant sound in a patient-specific model with velopharyngeal insufficiency

Dysfunction of the velopharyngeal valve in the human airway causes speech disorders because there is no separation between the oral and nasal cavities during normal oral speech. The speech literature hypothesizes that undesired sound is formed by turbulent flow in the nasal cavity in cases of small velopharyngeal openings. The aim is to determine the flow behavior and the sound-generating mechanism in the vocal tract using computational fluid dynamics in two patient-specific models with small and large velopharyngeal openings and contrast it with cases of complete velopharyngeal closure. The geometry for the models was reconstructed from computed tomography scans that were taken while the patients were sustaining a sibilant sound. The results for the turbulence are correlated with the broadband acoustic models of Proudman and Curle. The models show that turbulence in the vocal tract increases downstream of a constriction and that sound may be generated from it. Furthermore, most of the sound due to turbulence in the nasal cavity is governed by a dipole source where turbulence interacts with the nasal cavity walls. The generated sound power by turbulence itself in the nasal cavity (the quadrupole source) is two orders of magnitude less than the dipole source.