The motion of respiratory droplets produced by coughing
Coronavirus disease 2019 has become a global pandemic infectious respiratory disease with high mortality and infectiousness. This paper investigates respiratory droplet transmission, which is critical to understanding, modeling, and controlling epidemics. In the present work, we implemented flow vis...
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Veröffentlicht in: | Physics of Fluids 2020-12, Vol.32 (12), p.125102-125102 |
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Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | Coronavirus disease 2019 has become a global pandemic infectious respiratory disease with
high mortality and infectiousness. This paper investigates respiratory droplet
transmission, which is critical to understanding, modeling, and controlling epidemics. In
the present work, we implemented flow visualization, particle image velocimetry, and
particle shadow tracking velocimetry to measure the velocity of the airflow and droplets
involved in coughing and then constructed a physical model considering the evaporation
effect to predict the motion of droplets under different weather conditions. The
experimental results indicate that the convection velocity of cough airflow presents the
relationship t−0.7 with time; hence, the distance from the
cougher increases by t0.3 in the range of our measurement
domain. Substituting these experimental results into the physical model reveals that small
droplets (initial diameter D ≤ 100 μm) evaporate to
droplet nuclei and that large droplets with D ≥ 500 μm
and an initial velocity u0 ≥ 5 m/s travel more than 2 m.
Winter conditions of low temperature and high relative humidity can cause more droplets to
settle to the ground, which may be a possible driver of a second pandemic wave in the
autumn and winter seasons. |
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ISSN: | 1070-6631 1089-7666 1070-6631 |
DOI: | 10.1063/5.0033849 |