Effects of cough-jet on airflow and contaminant transport in an airliner cabin section

Abstract

The goals of this study were to investigate the effect of cough-jet on local airflow and contaminant transport in a typical cabin environment by using computational fluid dynamics. A fully occupied airliner cabin section was employed as the computational domain. Contaminants were released through coughing passengers from different locations inside the cabin. Numerical results in terms of contaminant transport characteristics were examined and compared. It can be concluded that cough-jet has significant effects on air flow in front of cough passenger in a short period of time. Also, it was found that, without considering the cough-jet model, the simulation results could not be a precise representation of the transport and distribution of cough-generated airborne contaminants.

Transmission of COVID-19 virus by droplets and aerosols: A critical review on the unresolved dichotomy

“…Air travelers spend extended periods in enclosed spaces, even for more than 10 h, which usually facilitates a conducive environment for the spread of infectious diseases. Extensive aerodynamic modeling has been performed to get an insight into how the buoyant jet of coughing by an infected person of a respiratory illness spreads in the cabin of a flight (Redrow et al, 2011;Yang et al, 2017). The hypothesis on the most affected zones within the cabin is, therefore, highlighted below.…”

The flow physics of COVID-19

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Influence of wind and relative humidity on the social distancing effectiveness to prevent COVID-19 airborne transmission: A numerical study

“…The transient cough-jet airflow waveform is based on the experimental measurements of the transient flow of a cough for 25 subjects (Kuga, Ito, Chen, Wang, & Kumagai, 2020;Yang et al, 2018) (see Fig. 2 (a)).…”