Finding the proper position of supply and return registers of air condition system in a conference hall in term of COVID-19 virus spread

The outbreak of the COVID-19 has affected all aspects of people's lives around the world. As air transmits the viruses, air-conditioning systems in buildings, surrounded environments, and public transport have a significant role in restricting the transmission of airborne pathogens. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model is deployed to simulate the dispersion of the COVID-19 virus due to the coughing of a patient in a con-ference hall, and the effect of displacement of supply and return registers of the air conditioning system is investigated. A validated Eulerian-Lagrangian CFD model is used to simulate the airflow in the conference hall. The particles created by coughing are droplets of the patient's saliva that contain the virus. Three cases with different positions of supply and return registers have been compared. The simulation results show that case1 has the best performance; since after 80 s in case 1 that the inlet registers are in the longitudinal wall, the whole particles are removed from space. However, in other cases, some particles are still in space.

Automated summary

In this paper, a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model was used to simulate the dispersion of COVID-19 virus in a conference hall when a patient coughs, and the effect of the position of air conditioning system's supply and return registers was investigated. The simulation results showed that when the inlet registers were located on the longitudinal wall, the virus particles were completely removed from the air after 80 seconds, while in other cases, virus particles still remained.