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

Ahmad Jahani Rahvard; Shahram Karami; Esmail Lakzian

doi:10.1016/j.ijrefrig.2022.10.010

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

Int J Refrig. 2023 Jan:145:78-89. doi: 10.1016/j.ijrefrig.2022.10.010. Epub 2022 Oct 20.

Authors

Ahmad Jahani Rahvard¹, Shahram Karami¹, Esmail Lakzian^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Center of Computational Energy, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Hakim Sabzevari University, Sabzevar, Iran.
² Department of Environmental Safety and Product Quality Management, Institute of Environmental Engineering, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University), 6 Miklukho-Maklaya Street, Moscow, 117198 Russia.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Andong National University, Andong, South Korea.

Abstract

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 conference 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.

Keywords: COVID-19; Computational fluid dynamic (CFD); Cough droplets; Discrete phase model (DPM); Dispersion.