High-fidelity simulation of pathogen propagation, transmission and mitigation in the built environment

Published in Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering, Special Issue: Modeling and Simulation of Infectious Diseases, Vol. 28, pp. 4237–4262, 2021
DOI: 10.1007/s11831-021-09606-6

Abstract

An overview of high-fidelity modeling of pathogen propagation, transmission and mitigation in the built environment is given. In order to derive the required physical and numerical models, the current understanding of pathogen, and in particular virus transmission and mitigation is summarized. The ordinary and partial differential equations that describe the flow, the particles and possibly the UV radiation loads in rooms or HVAC ducts are presented, as well as proper numerical methods to solve them in an expedient way. Thereafter, the motion of pedestrians, as well as proper ways to couple computational fluid dynamics and computational crowd dynamics to enable high-fidelity pathogen transmission and infection simulations is treated. The present review shows that high-fidelity simulations of pathogen propagation, transmission and mitigation in the built environment have reached a high degree of sophistication, offering a quantum leap in accuracy from simpler probabilistic models. This is particularly the case when considering the propagation of pathogens via aerosols in the presence of moving pedestrians.