Infection risk-based ventilation design method

There is large amount of research on COVID-19 infections including the spread and removal mechanisms of the virus in indoor spaces. Ventilation, air cleaning and air disinfection are the main engineering measures to control the virus spread in buildings. Wells Riley model allows to calculate the infection risk probability for any airborne virus aerosol-based transmission, but this calculation is overcomplicated in the ventilation design because of large amount of input data needed that is not easy to understand to ventilation designers. In this paper, an explicit equation derived for ventilation rate in the steady state at given infection risk probability is applied and further simplified to be suitable for practical design purposes. Application of the default input data for quanta emission rates, breathing rates and removal mechanisms by decay and deposition makes it possible to propose outdoor air ventilation rate equations which only parameters are the number of occupants and room volume. These equations for common indoor spaces make it possible to design pandemic ready buildings with ventilation and air cleaning solutions.