A numerical cough machine
Abstract
We introduce a simplified model of physiological coughing or sneezing, in the form of a thin liquid layer subject to a rapid (30 m/s) air stream. The setup is simulated using the Volume-Of-Fluid method with octree mesh adaptation, the latter allowing grid sizes small enough to capture the Kolmogorov length scale. The results confirm the trend to an intermediate distribution between a Log-Normal and a Pareto distribution for the distribution of droplet sizes in agreement with a previous re-analysis of experimental results by one of the authors. The mechanism of atomisation does not differ qualitatively from the multiphase mixing layer experiments and simulations. No mechanism for a bimodal distribution, also sometimes observed, is evidenced in these simulations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2101.05662,
title = {A numerical cough machine},
author = {Cesar Pairetti and Raphaël Villiers and Stéphane Zaleski},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.05662},
year = {2021}
}