Numerical study of different ventilation schemes in a classroom for efficient aerosol control

Ainara Ugarte-Anero; Unai Fernandez-Gamiz; Koldo Portal-Porras; Jose Manuel Lopez-Guede; Gaspar Sanchez-Merino

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19961

Numerical study of different ventilation schemes in a classroom for efficient aerosol control

Heliyon. 2023 Sep 7;9(9):e19961. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e19961. eCollection 2023 Sep.

Authors

Ainara Ugarte-Anero^{1

2

3}, Unai Fernandez-Gamiz^{1

2

3}, Koldo Portal-Porras¹, Jose Manuel Lopez-Guede^{2

3

4}, Gaspar Sanchez-Merino^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Nuclear Engineering and Fluid Mechanics Department, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Nieves Cano 12, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 01006, Araba, Spain.
² Bioaraba, New Technologies and Information Systems in Health Research Group, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
³ Osakidetza Basque Health Service, Araba University Hospital, Medical Physics Department, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
⁴ System Engineering and Automation Control Department, University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Nieves Cano 12, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 01006, Araba, Spain.

Abstract

The air quality is a parameter to be controlled in order to live in a comfortable place. This paper analyzes the trajectory of aerosols exhaled into the environment in a classroom. Three scenarios are investigated; without ventilation, with natural and with mechanical ventilation. A multi-phase computational fluid study based on Eulerian-Lagrangian techniques is defined. Temperature and ambient relative humidity, as well as air velocity, direction and pressure is taken into account. For droplets evaporation, mass transfer and turbulent dispersion have been added. This work tends to be of great help in various areas, such as the field of medicine and energy engineering, aiming to show the path of aerosols dispersed in the air. The results show that the classroom with a mechanical ventilation scheme offers good results when it comes to an efficient control of aerosols. In all three cases, aerosols exhaled into the environment impregnate the front row student in the first 0.5 s. Reaching the time of 4, 2 and 1 s, in the class without ventilation, mechanical and natural ventilation, respectively, the aerosols have been already deposited on the table of the person in the first row, being exposed for longer in the case of no ventilation. Particles with a diameter of less than 20 μm are distributed throughout the classroom over a long period. The air jet injected into the interior space offers a practically constant relative humidity and a drop in temperature, slowing down the process of evaporation of the particles. In the first second, it can be seen that a mass of 0.0025 mg formed by 9 million droplets accumulates, in cases without ventilation and natural ventilation. The room with a mechanical installation accumulated 5.5 million particles of mass 0.0028 mg in the first second. The energy losses generated by natural ventilation are high compared to the other scenarios, exactly forty and twenty times more in the scenario with mechanical ventilation and without ventilation, respectively.

Keywords: COVID-19; Computational fluid mechanics (CFD); Droplets; Evaporation; Fate; Flow; Mechanical ventilation; Natural ventilation; Sneezing.