A numerical study of COVID-19-laden droplets dispersion in aircraft cabin ventilation system

Abstract

Ventilation systems for aircraft cabins are mainly used to maintain a comfortable environment in the cabin and ensure the health of passengers. This study evaluates the decontamination performance of two cabin ventilation systems, the displacement ventilation (DV) system and the mixing ventilation (MV) system, in preventing contamination by virus (COVID-19)-laden droplets. The Euler-Lagrange method was used to computationally model droplet dispersion of different diameters and their behavior in the two systems was contrastively analyzed. Statistics on droplet suspension ratios and duration as well as the infection probability of each passenger were also computed. It was found that11.07% fewer droplet remained suspended in the DV system were than those in the MV system 10s from droplet release. In addition, the number of droplets extracted from the exhausts in the DV system was 13.15% more than the MV system at the 400s mark. In the DV system, higher ambient wind velocities were also found to locally increase infection probability for passengers in certain locations.