CFDforCOVID

CFDforCOVID is led by Dr Florent Duchaine from CERFACS, France. The ambition of the project is to provide an HPC tool, based on recent aerospace Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solvers to simulate the dispersion, evaporation, and contagion risks of all droplets emitted by an infected person, especially in enclosed spaces such as an aircraft cabin or a car. Also, during the project, ventilation flow, passenger locations, and the wearing of mask or not in an aircraft cabin and a car will be investigated. The researchers estimate that droplets, due to their small size, follow a path that depends strongly on the geometry of the space in which they propagate. They can go very far from the infected individual and follow a very complex trajectory, depending on the characteristics of the airflow in the cabin or room. The team working on the CFDforCOVID project will develop scenarios with different air conditioning specifications, with a different number of infected people breathing, speaking or coughing, and various lengths of time spent in the room. Then with CFD simulations, they will calculate the size, temperature, composition, velocity, age, and position of all virus loaded droplets at all times in three dimensions. This data will be associated with medical information (such as the lifetime of the virus in a droplet) and post-processed to provide risk evaluations. The project will assure global risk probabilities (for example, there is a 20 % chance the person sitting in this place for 45 minutes will be infected). According to the team, such highly sophisticated approaches are a crucial element in understanding the airborne transmission of the virus. Furthermore, the findings could support science-based policies for virus control. PRACE awarded this project 10 000 000 core hours on Joliot-Curie Rome, hosted by GENCI at CEA, France.