COVID-19 and urban spaces: A new integrated CFD approach for public health opportunities.

Autor: Hassan AM; Architectural Engineering and Urban Planning Department, Faculty of Engineering, Port Said University, Port Said, Egypt., Megahed NA; Architectural Engineering and Urban Planning Department, Faculty of Engineering, Port Said University, Port Said, Egypt.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Building and environment [Build Environ] 2021 Oct 15; Vol. 204, pp. 108131. Date of Electronic Publication: 2021 Jul 12.
DOI: 10.1016/j.buildenv.2021.108131
Abstrakt: Safe urban public spaces are vital owing to their impacts on public health, especially during pandemics such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Urban public spaces and urbanscape elements must be designed with the risk of viral transmission in mind. This work therefore examines how the design of urbanscape elements can be revisited to control COVID-19 transmission dynamics. Nine proposed models of urban public seating were thus presented and assessed using a transient three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, with the Eulerian-Lagrangian method and discrete phase model (DPM). The proposed seating models were evaluated by their impact on the normalized air velocity, the diameter of coughing droplets, and deposition fraction. Each of the proposed models demonstrated an increase in the normalized velocity, and a decrease in the deposition fraction by >29%. Diagonal cross linear and curved triangle configurations demonstrated an improved airflow momentum and turbulent flow, which decreased the droplets deposition fraction by 68%, thus providing an improved, healthier urban public seating option.
Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
(© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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