SBIR Phase I: A platform for simulating the combined effect of human behavior and environment on airborne infectious spread (COVID-19)

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to minimize infection by contagious diseases, such as COVID-19. This project advances a cloud-based platform for simulating particle flow in heavily populated, dynamic environments. It will enable facility managers and health/ safety stakeholders to simulate viral particle dispersion in indoor environments for design and mitigation procedures (disinfection, evacuation, etc.). This technology can play a role in mitigating the ongoing effects of the current COVID-19 pandemic and better prepare facilities for the next pandemic. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project supports facility planning and response of infectious disease outbreaks. The project advances a hybrid computational approach to utilizing multi-scale fluid analysis for faster-than-real-time multimodal simulation. The research objectives are to: (1) create a simulation platform that can parallelize equations and perform at near real-time or real-time, which will provide a means to simulate multimodal interactions in real buildings, such as contamination spread in fluid flow, when analyzed with human behavior and mobility; (2) characterize and validate the results of the simulator by measuring particle spread in multiple real building scenarios. It is anticipated that the simulation results of particle trajectory and surface contamination will be at least as accurate as state-of-the-art high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic techniques, but delivered in real time. This project will provide an environment and behavior-specific simulation essential for optimizing airflow and facility controls to reducing airborne infectious transmission. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.