Surface forces in lungs. III. Alveolar surface tension and elastic properties of lung parenchyma.

The bulk modulus and the shear modulus describe the capacity of material to resist a change in volume and a change of shape, respectively. The values of these elastic coefficients for air-filled lung parenchyma suggest that there is a qualitative difference between the mechanisms by which the parenchyma resists expansion and shear deformation; the bulk modulus changes roughly exponentially with the transpulmonary pressure, whereas the shear modulus is nearly a constant fraction of the transpulmonary pressure for a wide range of volumes. The bulk modulus is approximately 6.5 times as large as the shear modulus. In recent microstructural modeling of lung parenchyma, these mechanisms have been pictured as being similar to the mechanisms by which an open cell liquid foam resists deformations. In this paper, we report values for the bulk moduli and the shear moduli of normal air-filled rabbit lungs and of air-filled lungs in which alveolar surface tension is maintained constant at 16 dyn/cm. Elevating surface tension above normal physiological values causes the bulk modulus to decrease and the shear modulus to increase. Furthermore, the bulk modulus is found to be sensitive to a dependence of surface tension on surface area, but the shear modulus is not. These results agree qualitatively with the predictions of the model, but there are quantitative differences between the data and the model.