CFD Analysis (the spread of COVID-19)
In this research, the movement and diffusion of coronavirus particles in the airflow, which is caused by the sneezing of an infected person in front of the class (for example a teacher), has been investigated with the help of CFD and 3D turbulence model. Also, the Lagrangian particle trajectory analysis method was used to track the
droplets. A numerical model has been used to investigate the effect of ventilation airflow speed of 4 m/s on the dispersion of droplets of the same size.
Advanced professor: Dr. Delfani
Team members: Niloofar Zare, Zahra Raees Karami
Physical Model
Mathematical Model
In this study, numerical modeling of the flow dynamics of the transmission of the COVID_19 viruses was performed in two steps. First, a steady-state classroom’s turbulent airflow condition was simulated used natural ventilation and the RNG k-ε model. In the second step, water droplets presented in the below table (that could contain COVID-19 viruses) were expelled by coughing from the mouth of the infected person standing in front of the classroom and tracked using the Eulerian-Lagrangian method. In addition, pictures of classroom’s mesh of the computational model in ANSYS-Fluent software are below.
Results
According to the investigations carried out in this research, it can be concluded that:
1. If the teacher is sick, the position of the teacher and the board should be near the air outlet to prevent the spread of the virus inside the classroom. If the sick person is placed in the path of direct airflow where there is no other person in the way, the probability of healthy people contracting the disease will be lower.
2. Increasing the speed of airflow leads to the faster exit of Covid particles from the classroom. In order to increase the speed of air flow in natural ventilation in the investigated classroom, it is suggested to use two entrances with smaller dimensions instead of one large entrance (window). Also, in front of both the air outlet windows, one of the outlets can be considered as the classroom door and the other as the air outlet valve on the wall. In this way, the speed of the air flow increases and the polluted particles are removed from the space faster.
