A Computational Approach for the Characterization of Airborne Pathogen Transmission in Turbulent Molecular Communication Channels

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CFD-based method to model and analyze airborne pathogen transmission in turbulent airflows, providing statistical characterizations of infection probabilities relevant to infectious disease spread.

Contribution

It presents a novel computational approach combining CFD simulations with statistical analysis to characterize pathogen transmission in turbulent molecular communication channels.

Findings

Turbulence causes multi-modal distributions in infection probability.

The model captures the irregular effects of turbulence on pathogen dispersion.

Different air velocities lead to distinct statistical distributions of transmission.

Abstract

Airborne pathogen transmission mechanisms play a key role in the spread of infectious diseases such as COVID-19. In this work, we propose a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach to model and statistically characterize airborne pathogen transmission via pathogen-laden particles in turbulent channels from a molecular communication viewpoint. To this end, turbulent flows induced by coughing and the turbulent dispersion of droplets and aerosols are modeled by using the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the realizable $k-\epsilon$ model and the discrete random walk model, respectively. Via simulations realized by a CFD simulator, statistical data for the number of received particles are obtained. These data are post-processed to obtain the statistical characterization of the turbulent effect in the reception and to derive the probability of infection. Our results reveal that the turbulence has an irregular effect on the probability of infection, which shows itself by the multi-modal distribution as a weighted sum of normal and Weibull distributions. Furthermore, it is shown that the turbulent MC channel is characterized via multi-modal, i.e., sum of weighted normal distributions, or stable distributions, depending on the air velocity.