Investigation on the cross-infection control performance of interactive cascade ventilation in multi-scenario of winter

Abstract

With the wide spread of COVID-19, numerous cases demonstrate that proper ventilation method can reduce the cross-infection risk obviously. Interactive cascade ventilation (ICV) as a recently proposed ventilation method, the advantage of indoor environment construction has been proven. However, few studies are conducted to investigate the virus prevention and control characteristics of ICV, which is particularly important under epidemic normalizing. Hence, this study explored and compared the cross-infection control performance of three ventilation strategies, namely mixing ventilation (MV), stratum ventilation (SV), and interactive cascade ventilation (ICV), with a validated CFD model. A typical office was selected as the background scene, where an infected person coughs, sneezes with standing or sitting at different positions. Exposure doses, health infection risk, and disease burden (DB) were employed as the evaluation indicators under different ventilation methods of multi-scenario. The research results indicated that the average aerosol exposure dose among the human respiratory region under ICV was 0.29 g/day, which was reduced by 67 % and 50 % compared with MV and SV. In addition, only in ICV can the health infection risk meets the EPA standard. The average disease health burden for exposed persons under ICV was 0.93 × 10−6 DALYs pppy, which was 37 % and 70 % lower than SV and MV. The findings obtained from this study confirm that ICV performs excellently in reducing the cross-infection risk, providing the theoretical basis for future epidemic prevention and control.