Abstract
The indoor environment can play a significant role in the transmission of and exposure to various contaminants. In the case of some emerging aerial infections, such as those caused by influenza virus and tuberculosis virus, the airborne route of transmission is considered to be important for evaluating the exposure health risk associated with exposure to contaminants. In this paper, we first present an analytical procedure for coupling the computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based prediction of unsteady contaminant concentration distribution with a basic epidemiological model (here, SIR model) and this procedure can be used to predict exposure risk of residents in hospital space. In this study, we focus on the coupled simulation of unsteady and non-uniform distribution of infectious particle concentration and infectious risk, which directly indicates the changes in the population densities of Susceptible (S) and Infective (I) in a hospital space. The numerical analysis involved changes in the type of contaminant and infection probability and was performed for a hospital waiting space with a complicated geometry. The results showed a non-uniform distribution of (S) and (I) in such spaces. Moreover, these results indicated the dependence on unsteady and inhomogeneous contaminant distribution.
