ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the COVID-19 has affected all aspects of people's lives around the world. As air transmits the viruses, air-conditioning systems in buildings, surrounded environments, and public transport have a significant role in restricting the transmission of airborne pathogens. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) model is deployed to simulate the dispersion of the COVID-19 virus due to the coughing of a patient in a conference hall, and the effect of displacement of supply and return registers of the air conditioning system is investigated. A validated Eulerian-Lagrangian CFD model is used to simulate the airflow in the conference hall. The particles created by coughing are droplets of the patient's saliva that contain the virus. Three cases with different positions of supply and return registers have been compared. The simulation results show that case1 has the best performance; since after 80 s in case 1 that the inlet registers are in the longitudinal wall, the whole particles are removed from space. However, in other cases, some particles are still in space.
