Improving the safety of air travel is of the utmost importance to the aerospace industry. Although the exact mechanism of the current pandemic transmission is not fully understood, integrators are leveraging computational methods to understand the behavior of coughs in an enclosed environment. To improve the fidelity of these models requires a detailed representation of the physics of the human cough including the distribution and velocities of droplets, evaporation of the water content, the impingement of the droplets of nearby surfaces, and the impact of gravity on the propagation. In this presentation, we will discuss the current state of the art of cough modeling and the extension to air cabins as well as the impact of a standard mask on droplet transmission. We will discuss several examples from current organizations leveraging CFD to improve their understanding on HVAC and cabin environments.
Biography
Durrell Rittenberg is the Ph.D. Director of Aerospace and Defense Siemens Simulation and Test Services. Over the past 17 years Rittenberg has helped engineering organizations leverage CFD and other computational methods to drive innovation in their design process. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Utah, where he studied design, modeling and characterization of advanced materials. He studied at Osaka University as a Monbusho fellow and as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. He is currently a senior member of AIAA and a member of the Inlets, Nozzles, and Propulsion Systems Integration Technical Committee, as well as a member of the CFD 2030 integration committee.
Prashanth Shankara is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager with Siemens Digital Industries Software (DISW). Shankara holds a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from SRM University, India and an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from The Ohio State University. He is currently in charge of Product Marketing for Simcenter STAR-CCM+, a multiphysics CFD simulation software from Siemens DISW. He has over 11 years of CFD simulation experience. His special focus area is aerodynamics, having contributed to the High Lift and Drag Prediction Workshops. Recently, he worked with Airbus as the lead researcher from Siemens for the project on cough modeling in an airplane cabin.
