?:abstract
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Violent respiratory diseases, i e , coronavirus (COVID-19), spread through saliva in coughs and sneezes or are even exhaled in the form of microbial pathogen micro-droplets Therefore, in this work, a comprehensive fully coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian method has been applied for infection control, thus leading to a deeper understanding of the saliva-disease-carrier droplet transmission mechanisms and also of their trajectory tracking by using the OpenFOAM package This model determines the droplet-air interactions, the breakup process, and turbulent dispersion forces on each micro-droplet that is expelled within the respiratory tract in a correct way By examining a broad range of initial velocities, size distributions, injection angles of saliva micro-droplets, and mouth opening areas, we predict the maximum opening area that can be driven by micro-droplets One important contribution of this work is to present a correlation for the length and width of the overall direct maximum reach of the micro-droplets, driven by a wide range of mild coughs to intense sneezes Our results indicate that the movement of the expelled droplets is mainly influenced by their size, angle, velocity, and environmental factors During a virus crisis, like COVID-19, this paper can be used to determine the \'social distance\' between individuals to avoid contamination, by inhaling or touching their bodies, due to these saliva-disease-carrier droplets in sneezing, at various social distance positions such as face-to-face, meeting standing, and near equipment The safe distance must be increased to around 4 m during a sneeze By wearing a face mask and by bending the head during a sneeze as a protective action, we can reduce the contamination area to one-third and three-quarters, respectively Furthermore, the dispersion of the film of the expelled saliva micro-droplets and the spatial relationship between the subjects, which affects the airflow inside the room, are also analyzed in detail
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