COVID-19, which is known to spread through the inhalation of virus-laden aerosols, can persist in public washrooms up to 10 times longer than in other open spaces, led by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay The need for proper ventilation has been stressed in an alarming study. of indoor spaces. The COVID-19 virus rides inside tiny microscopic droplets or aerosols that come out of our mouths when we speak, shout, sing, cough, or sneeze. It then floats within the air, where it can be inhaled and transmitted by other people. But in indoor spaces, it remains more in shared washrooms, room corners or dead areas around furniture, increasing the chances of transmission of the infection.
In a new study published in the journal Physics of Fluids, the IIT-Bombay team explored how airflow can reduce the transmission of COVID-19 indoors by taking signals from the airflow around aircraft and engines.
The researchers found that the dead zone is more prone to infection.
“Surprisingly, they can be near a door or window, or right next to where an air conditioner is blowing air. You can expect that,” Krishnandu Sinha, professor of aerospace engineering at IIT-Bombay, said in a statement. that these would be safe zones, but they are not.
In washrooms – present within offices, restaurants, schools, airplanes, trains and other public spaces – water use was found to be a major source of aerosols, and computer simulations of airflow within a public washroom showed that dead zones Infectious aerosols can stop in That’s 10 times longer than the rest of the room, the researchers said.
“Computer simulations show that air flows in curved paths like a vortex,” said Vivek Kumar, a co-author.
“Ideally, air should be constantly removed from every part of the room and replaced with fresh air. This is not easy to do when air is trapped in a dead zone,” he explained.
At present, ventilation design is often based on hourly air changes. Sinha said, although these design calculations assume that fresh air reaches every corner of the room equally, computer simulations and experiments in actual washrooms show that this is not the case.
“The air change per hour is not the same for all parts of the room. It can be as low as 10 times for the dead zone. In order to design the ventilation system to be more effective against the virus, we need to measure the air circulation within the room. There is a need to install ducts and fans at the base. Blindly increasing the amount of air through the existing ducts will not solve the problem,” he suggested.
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