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Peering Inside A Cough Or Sneeze To Explain Enhanced Airborne Transmission Under Dry Weather, Kai Liu, Majid Allahyari, Jorge S. Salinas, ‪Nadim Zgheib, S. Balachandar

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

High-fidelity simulations of coughs and sneezes that serve as virtual experiments are presented, and they offer an unprecedented opportunity to peer into the chaotic evolution of the resulting airborne droplet clouds. While larger droplets quickly fall-out of the cloud, smaller droplets evaporate rapidly. The non-volatiles remain airborne as droplet nuclei for a long time to be transported over long distances. The substantial variation observed between the different realizations has important social distancing implications, since probabilistic outlier-events do occur and may need to be taken into account when assessing the risk of contagion. Contrary to common expectations, we observe dry ambient …