Computational characterization of the behavior of a saliva droplet in a social environment

Abstract

The conduct of respiratory droplets is the basis of the study to reduce the spread of a virus in society. The pandemic suffered in early 2020 due to COVID-19 shows the lack of research on the evaporation and fate of droplets exhaled in the environment. The current study, attempts to provide solution through computational fluid dynamics techniques based on a multiphase state with the help of Eulerian–Lagrangian techniques to the activity of respiratory droplets. A numerical study has shown how the behavior of droplets of pure water exhaled in the environment after a sneeze or cough have a dynamic equal to the experimental curve of Wells. The droplets of saliva have been introduced as a saline solution. Considering the mass transferred and the turbulence created, the results has showed that the ambient temperature and relative humidity are parameters that significantly affect the evaporation process, and therefore to the fate. Evaporation time tends to be of a higher value when the temperature affecting the environment is lower. With constant parameters of particle diameter and ambient temperature, an increase in relative humidity increases the evaporation time. A larger particle diameter is consequently transported at a greater distance, since the opposite force it affects is the weight. Finally, a neural network-based model is presented to predict particle evaporation time.

Numerical modeling of a sneeze, a cough and a continuum speech inside a hospital lift

“…The achieved R value was positive and less than 1, which means that a monotonic convergence was obtained, [ 43 ]. The grid verification study was conducted in a similar way of Ugarte-Anero et al [ 44 ]. Details can be found in Appendix A.…”

“…The validation procedure presented in Redrow et al [ 47 ], Morawska [ 48 ], Li et al [ 49 ] and Ugarte-Anero et al [ 44 ] was used for the validation of the present work. A study in which different diameters of droplets of pure water (1 μm 10 μm and 100 μm) with a temperature of 310.15 K are subjected to an environment of 293.15 K and RH varies to see the evaporation time.…”

Numerical study of different ventilation schemes in a classroom for efficient aerosol control

“…The numerical studies of Ref. [ 6 , 21 , 29 , [37] , [38] , [39] ] also use this method to validate their work. The study of Ref.…”

“…For instance, studies as Ref. [ 6 ] shows that a project on the dynamics of a single droplet of saliva, indicates that both, ambient temperature and relative humidity, are parameters that directly affect the evaporation time of the drops of a human sneeze. Therefore, more time in the environment implies lower air quality and a greater chance of infection.…”

Voltage and Overpotential Prediction of Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries with Artificial Neural Networks

“…These surrogate models offer the flexibility and speed of low-fidelity models, while incorporating many aspects of advanced computational models. In the field of fluid mechanics, several studies have used ANNs to model different cases, such as active [32] and passive flow control devices [33], vehicle aerodynamics [34], thermal systems [35], and multiphase-state systems [36], to mention a few.…”