Direct numerical simulation of a moist cough flow using Eulerian approximation for liquid droplets

DOI10.1080/10618562.2022.2057479zbMATH Open1502.76112arXiv2110.01875OpenAlexW3202023540MaRDI QIDQ5080263FDOQ5080263

Authors: Rohit Singhal, S. Ravichandran, Sourabh S. Diwan 

Publication date: 31 May 2022

Published in: International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired several studies on the fluid dynamics of respiratory events. Here, we propose a computational approach in which respiratory droplets are coarse-grained into an Eulerian liquid field advected by the fluid streamlines. A direct numerical simulation is carried out for a moist cough using a closure model for space-time dependence of the evaporation time scale. Estimates of the Stokes number are provided, for the initial droplet size of $10mu$m, which are found to be <<1 thereby justifying the neglect of droplet inertia. Several of the important features of the moist-cough flow reported in the literature using Lagrangian tracking methods have been accurately captured using our scheme. Some new results are presented, including the evaporation time for a "mild" cough, a saturation-temperature diagram and a favourable correlation between the vorticity and liquid fields. The present approach is particularly useful for studying the long-range transmission of virus-laden droplets.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01875

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zbMATH Keywords

COVID-19incompressible Navier-Stokes equationsfinite volume solver Megha-5liquid field approximationlong-range pathogen transmissionphase change thermodynamicsrespiratory droplet

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Epidemiology (92D30) Liquid-gas two-phase flows, bubbly flows (76T10) Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible viscous fluids (76D05) Stefan problems, phase changes, etc. (80A22) Finite volume methods applied to problems in fluid mechanics (76M12)

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Cited In (5)

• A case study on pathogen transport, deposition, evaporation and transmission: linking high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations to probability of infection
• On shear layer atomization within closed channels: numerical simulations of a cough-replicating experiment
• Effects of physical property changes of expelled respiratory liquid on atomization morphology
• Modeling and simulation of the infection zone from a cough
• A note on the stability characteristics of the respiratory events

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