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It has been documented that diseases can spread within an aircraft cabin from the sneezing, coughing or breathing of a sick passenger. To understand the spreading mechanism it is very important to quantify the airflow and droplet transmission around a sneezing/coughing incident. In this project, tracer gas experiments were carried out in a full-scale Boeing 767-300 mock-up to study the global transport process of contaminated air within the cabin. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was also used to provide additional information for understanding the principle. A steady airflow field was simulated first and then it was compared with the experimental data. The global airflow patterns were similar to those observed experimentally. This velocity field was adopted as the initial condition for further unsteady pollutant transport simulation. Experimental and simulated results were compared and discussed to develop a relationship between concentration and airflow pattern, source location, transport direction, and ventilation rate. Finally, the overall picture of concentration evolution by both experimental and simulated approaches was discussed.

Air age is an important index to evaluate indoor air quality in ventilated rooms. Current definition of air age is limited to indoor part, i.e., the air age at the inlets of air supply diffusers is assumed to be zero. This work extends the air age concept to the so-called “total air age” by considering the impact of air delivery process on air age. The air age in duct is solved using one-dimensional flow characteristic, which includes the mixing process between airflows with different ages. It is then coupled with the room air age which is solved using computational fluid dynamics technique. An iterative algorithm is proposed to calculate total air age in general ventilation systems and a direct method is further derived for systems with only one air handling unit. Two examples are given to demonstrate the calculation of total air age and the distributions of total air age are compared with those of traditional air age.