COVID-19 flow : physics and fluid dynamics

Abstract

COVID-19 has been declared a global pandemic in March 2020, and since then life hasn’t been the same. It impacted every human’s everyday life and everyone is still learning how to cope with the virus spreading. Scientists were baffled of how the virus is spreading so fast until they confirmed human to human infection was possible. The actual physical mode of transmission of virus still isn’t fully understood. In order to fully understand the physics and flow dynamics of a cough jet, a numerical and computational study was conducted by the help of ANSYS Fluent which is a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The multiphase gas-liquid flow was simulated using both a Eulerian-Eulerian and a Eulerian-Lagrangian approach and a standard single-phase model. The main purpose of this study verifying if the single-phase model is enough. The SST 𝑘-𝜔 turbulence model was used in this study. Qualitative results were extracted, compared, and analyzed. The single-phase model turned out to be a poor model for this application. Both the Eulerian-Eulerian and the Eulerian-Lagrangian models showed recognizable features of cough jets. Furthermore, the necessity of wearing face masks was proven.