Numerical simulation of airflow and airborne pathogen transport in aircraft cabins - Part 2 : numerical simulation of airborne pathogen transport

An initial study to develop a numerical tool using CFD methods for investigating the potential of disease transmission in commercial aircraft is completed. To gain insight of the general airflow pattern, a detailed CFD model of a small section in the passenger cabin of a B767-300 passenger cabin was built and a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulation was performed. By comparing with the available test date, the RANS simulation substantially underpredicted the turbulence intensity, especially in and around the breathing zone. A separate large eddy simulation (LES) was conducted to obtain a more realistic turbulent energy transport in a generic cabin model. The LES predicted turbulence level is in fairly good agreement with the test data.
A RANS simulation with adjusted turbulence was then employed to simulate the dispersion of airborne pathogen in the detailed passenger cabin model. These adjustments allow for the simulation of disease transmission using less than 1/100 of the computing hardware resources required for an equivalent LES of airflow and particle transport.
This paper is an elaboration on the numerical study of the transport of airborne pathogens in an aircraft cabin.