“Virus Dispersion: Potentiality of the Computational Fluid Dynamics”: this is the title of the paper presented by Prof. Giovanni Lombardi, Technical Director of Cubit’s Fluid Dynamics Division, in the session dedicated to Covid-19 at the IEEE CAMAD 2020 conference. In this global emergency, the entire scientific research community is called upon to help identify possible tools to contain the pandemic.
In this context, Cubit’s Fluid Dynamics Division explored the possibilities offered by CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), running a number of numerical simulations of bodily emissions such as sneezing and coughing. Starting from standard experimental data on intensity and composition, the team traced the behaviour of particles dispersed in still air while simultaneously determining their size and weight. The simulations covered sneezing and coughing from an isolated head as well as interacting adult bodies in various settings, including an airport restroom — where the air jet from an electric hand dryer was also taken into account.
CFD offers the major advantage of delivering high-quality results quickly: using 512 of the 9,216 cores in Cubit’s computing cluster, 5 seconds of physical time were simulated in 3 hours — enough to characterise the behaviour of the particles. A large number of cases can be analysed simultaneously, allowing effective containment measures to be identified rapidly.
CFD therefore proves to be a tool that, in the hands of domain experts, can make a substantial contribution to defining measures to help contain the ongoing pandemic.
#ImproveResearchCubit
