Size dependent effectiveness of engineering and administrative control strategies for both short- and long-range airborne transmission control

Lyu, Xiaowei, Luo, Zhiwen Vincent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2082-3958 and Shao, Li 2024. Size dependent effectiveness of engineering and administrative control strategies for both short- and long-range airborne transmission control. Environmental Science: Atmospheres 4 , pp. 43-56. 10.1039/D3EA00115F

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

Ventilation is known to reduce long-range airborne transmission, but a recent study by Li et al. (2021) demonstrated that it can also impact short-range airborne transmission. Our study extends their work by developing a size-dependent risk model for both short- and long-range airborne transmission and evaluate the impact of various control strategies including ventilation. Adopting a recent determined mode-dependent viral load, we first analyzed the impact of droplet size on airbrone transmission. Compared to adopting a constant viral load, in which large droplets would contain more viruses, our findings demonstrated that droplets in the range of ~ 2-4 µm are more significant for short-range airborne transmission, while those in the range of ~ 1-2 µm are more important for long-range airborne transmission. We also found that incorporating the size-dependent efficiency of filtration/masks can significantly alter the rate of change (ROC) of virus concentration relative to both distance and ventilation. This underscores the critical role of considering droplet size in risk assessment. Engineering control strategies of ventilation and filtration, as well as administrative control strategies of distance and mask, have different effectiveness in reducing virus concentration. Our findings indicate that the utilization of high-efficiency masks can drastically reduce virus concentrations and may also diminish the impacts of other strategies. Due to the size-dependent efficiency of filtration, ventilation has a more important role in reducing virus concentration than filtration, especially for long-range airborne transmission. For short-range airborne transmission, the effectiveness of maintaining distance is substantially greater than that of ventilation, and it is almost unaffected by ventilation. However, the extent to which ventilation can influence both the virus concentration and its variation with respect to distance primarily depends on the specific transmission model utilized. This study estimates the different roles of different droplets and control strategies in short- and long-range airborne transmission, providing a reference for size-dependent airborne transmission control in the future.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Architecture
Publisher:	Royal Society of Chemistry
ISSN:	2634-3606
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	11 December 2023
Date of Acceptance:	27 November 2023
Last Modified:	13 Feb 2024 15:05
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/164543

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item