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Numerical Study of SARS-CoV-2 Virus Dispersion in Hospital Wards

Ahmadian, Hossein | 2022

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 55060 (06)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Abdekhodaie, Mohammad Jafar
  7. Abstract:
  8. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has driven our attention to a simulation of virus dispersion to complete our understanding of airborne transmission. A myriad of studies have shown that respiratory diseases such as MERS, SARS, and COVID-19 can be transmitted by virus-laden droplets released during coughs, sneezing, and normal breathing. To mitigate and prevent the spread of such infectious diseases, investigation of the transmission routes is of great importance. This study has been fueled to harness the CFD tool to simulate the virus-laden droplets dispersion in hospitals inwards. Because of the limitations intertwined with experimental works such as the risk of infection of experimenters, and on the other hand, with the advantages endowed with numerical studies, such as lower costs, in this study, such a recent technique has been applied for the understanding of the respiratory droplet dispersion released from sneezing of a patient in a cath lab equipped with the HVAC system. The effect of the HVAC system on droplet deposition in the cath lab is the thesis’s main goal with considerations of a function for the sneezing velocity varying with time and using an empirical distribution for droplets’ diameter. It was found that when the HVAC system was off, released droplets reached the bed, and as a result, it put the room at the risk of infection. When the HVAC system was on, but the inlet velocity was low (v=0.5 m/s), the HVAC systems could make droplets posit earlier in comparison to when any HVAC system wasn’t on in the Cath lab, however, it could not deposit the droplets on the floor before reaching the bed and the client was at the risk of infection as well. While the inlet velocity was high enough (v=2 m/s), it was shown that it was able to settle down the droplets released from the infected person’s sneeze, and large eddies did not allow the droplets to march forward. In conclusion, HVAC systems can play a significant role in the mitigation of infections in the hospital inwards
  9. Keywords:
  10. COVID-19 ; Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) ; Infectious Diseases ; Direct Expansion (DX) Heating Ventilation Air Condition (HVAC) ; Respiratory Diseases ; Viruses ; Droplet Dispersion ; Simulation

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