Coronavirus Patient Breathing in an Airplane

Description

This project simulates the airborne transmission of coronavirus particles among airplane passengers via breathing, using ANSYS Fluent, in response to the well-documented risk that close passenger spacing on aircraft poses for disease spread. The computational domain represents an airplane cabin with rows of seats, one passenger modeled per seat, and each passenger's mouth defined as a surface source for exhaled breath and virus-laden droplets. Since maintaining physical distance is difficult in a cabin, the goal is to characterize how far and how effectively breath-borne virus particles travel between nearby passengers under the aircraft's actual ventilation conditions. The geometry is built in 3D in SpaceClaim and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with an unstructured grid of 1,316,384 elements.

Methodology

Virus-laden droplets are modeled with a density of 1000 kg/m³, specific heat of 1680 J/kg·K, viscosity of 0.000172 kg/m·s, and surface tension of 0.03 N/m, released from each passenger's mouth during breathing. Since the goal is tracking a discrete population of droplets moving through the continuous cabin airflow, the Discrete Phase Model (DPM) is used, with the particles defined as inert and injected as a surface injection through each passenger's mouth inlet, at a diameter of 0.000001 m, temperature of 308 K, velocity of 0.05 m/s, and flow rate of 0.0000221 kg/s. The cabin's ventilation is represented in detail: fresh air enters from ceiling vents at 2.36 m/s and 292.65 K, from side vents at 0.3 m/s and 292.65 K, and from under-seat vents at 0.59 m/s and 292.65 K, while spent air exits through two lower-side outlets held at atmospheric pressure.

Analysis

The solution yields particle tracking based on residence time, along with 3D temperature and velocity contours throughout the cabin. These results show the virus-laden particles leaving the mouth and being picked up by the surrounding ventilation flow, tracing how the cabin's air circulation pattern carries exhaled droplets toward or away from neighboring passengers. This confirms the model captures its intended purpose: showing how the interaction between passenger breathing and the aircraft's specific airflow pattern governs the pathway and residence time of virus-carrying particles in an enclosed cabin environment.