Assessment of COVID-19 aerosol transmission in a university campus food environment using a numerical method

Abstract

With the prevalence of COVID-19, the phenomenon of viruses spreading through aerosols has become a focus of attention. Diners in university dining halls have a high risk of exposure to respiratory droplets from others without the protection of face masks, which greatly increases the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Therefore, the transmission mechanism of respiratory droplets in extremely crowded dining environments should be investigated. In this study, a numerical simulation of coughing at dining tables under two conditions was performed, namely the presence and absence of protective partitions, and the evaporation and condensation of aerosol droplets in the air were examined. By using the numerical method, we analyzed and verified the isolation effect of dining table partitions in the propagation of aerosol droplets. The effect of changes in room temperature on the diffusion of coughed aerosols when partitions were present was analyzed. We demonstrated how respiratory droplets spread through coughing and how these droplets affect others. Finally, we proposed a design for a dining table partition that minimizes the transmission of COVID-19.

Keywords

• COVID-19 transmission
• University dining hall
• Cough
• Table partition
• Computational fluid dynamics