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Zarghanishiraz, Reza

University of British Columbia

The critical lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic underscore the utmost importance of proactively addressing airborne transmitting diseases, necessitating comprehensive research and development of air purifying devices aimed at eliminating airborne pathogens, to safeguard public health. In this study, particle-laden airflow is passed through multiple layers of finely woven metal mesh screens located at different angular orientations which will both capture the particles and inactivate the pathogens by thermal treatment. The metal mesh screens are used as heating elements by applying a voltage to them to heat the air and take it to 150° C. It has been shown in the previous studies that the required exposure time for achieving a 3-log reduction of viral load (i.e. 99.9% inactivation) in SARS-CoV2 as a pathogen example at this temperature is as small as 0.02 s. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations took place in an Eulerian-Lagrangian framework using ANSYS Fluent to study the particle removal efficiency of the mesh screen layer under 16 airflow velocities ranging from 0.01-5 m/s for 10 particle size groups ranging from 50 nm-10μm. The impact of wire diameter, mesh porosity, heating and airflow temperature on the particle removal efficiency of the layers was studied. The results were presented based on dimensionless parameters, Stokes and Peclet numbers and were compared to the previous studies. A drop in removal efficiency of the particles with an intermediate-Stokes number was observed when wires were used as heating elements. Lastly, the pressure drop and quality factor of the mesh screens were examined.

Text

2023-08-28

10.14288/1.0435600

Master of Science - MSc

Applied Science, Faculty of; Engineering, School of (Okanagan)

2023-09

Graduate