
Faculty of Engineering
University of Nottingham, UK.
By Dr. Parham Mirzaei Ahranjani, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, UK.
COVID19 pathogens are primarily transmitted via airborne respiratory droplets expelled from infected bio-sources. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a broadly used as a reliable method to model airborne disease transmissions to support decision making process and envisaging mitigatory protocols.
Nonetheless, there are several limitations and challenges against using CFD. This includes requirements of extensive computational resources, lack of validation cases for CFD models, and oversimplification of the underlying physics. Moreover, uncertainties in the collected clinical data such as droplets’ initial velocities, tempo-spatial profiles, release angle, and size distributions are broadly reported in literature. Further to these limitations, CFD modeling of personalized protection equipment (PPE) and filters demands models to have microscale resolutions. On the other hand, the disease transmission demands a room or a complete building to be modeled with a considerably larger resolution in meters. The connection of the latter resolutions needs extra care in the CFD modeling.
This presentation, hence, overviews the application of airborne pathogen droplet CFD modeling in enclosed spaces and in development of mitigatory technologies. Then, it scrutinizes the capabilities and limitations associated to the CFD modeling and experimental techniques used to investigate airborne pathogen droplet transmissions in multiple scales.
Biography
Dr. Mirzaei is an assistant Professor in The University of Nottingham. He is the director of the Building and Urban Energy and Health Research Laboratory. Dr Mirzaei has an extensive research portfolio about a variety of topics in building scales such as airborne pathogen transmission (such as COVID19), energy efficiency, architectural design and efficiency, smart buildings, indoor/outdoor comfort and air quality, integration of renewable energies, energy storage, building aerodynamics as well as the urban scale studies such as distributed energy solutions, smart cities, urban systems modeling, urban heat island, and pollution and airborne pathogen dispersion modeling. Dr Mirzaei has utilized these studies using diverse experimental techniques (e.g., PIV, wind tunnel, satellite remote sensing, GIS, field survey, in-situ velocimetry, etc.), statistical approaches (e.g., artificial intelligence, big data analytics, data sampling) and numerical and optimization methods (finite volume, finite difference, energy balance modeling, building information modeling, etc.).
Dr. Mirzaei has published more than 60 journal papers and 5 book chapters while many of his papers were/are amongst highly cited papers in the leading journals of the field. He is the sole author of a fundamental and reference book to be used by Architectures, Building Engineering, Architectural Engineering, Urban Planning, and Geography schools entitled as “Computational Fluid Dynamics and Energy Modelling in Buildings: Fundamentals and Applications”, which will be published by Wiley in 2022.