High Fidelity Modeling of Aerosol Pathogen Propagation in Built Environments with Moving Pedestrians

TL;DR

This paper introduces a high fidelity model combining fluid dynamics and crowd movement to accurately simulate aerosol pathogen spread in environments with moving pedestrians, highlighting the impact of human motion on airflow and infection risk.

Contribution

It presents a novel coupled CFD and crowd dynamics model for detailed pathogen propagation simulation in built environments.

Findings

Pedestrian motion significantly influences airflow patterns.

Pathogen dispersion varies with pedestrian movement.

Model demonstrates the importance of considering human motion in infection risk assessments.

Abstract

A high fidelity model for the propagation of pathogens via aerosols in the presence of moving pedestrians is proposed. The key idea is the tight coupling of computational fluid dynamics and computational crowd dynamics in order to capture the emission, transport and inhalation of pathogen loads in space and time. An example simulating pathogen propagation in a narrow corridor with moving pedestrians clearly shows the considerable effect that pedestrian motion has on airflow, and hence on pathogen propagation and potential infectivity.