Use of DNATrax and high fidelity computational methods to model transport of contaminants in urban environments

PROJECT SUMMARY ! The abundance of airborne micron sized pollutant correlates with the prevalence and severity of respiratory diseaseswhich represents therd leading cause of death in the United States and have an economical cost of tens of billions of dollars per yearGrowing concerns on the possibility of terrorist attacks have motivated efforts in preparing for and responding to airborne releases of chemicalbiological or nuclear materials in highly populated regionsExperimental and computational techniques that can precisely correlate the fate of a contaminant with its initial release location are sorely needed to inform and validate the next generation of predictive tools in the area of contaminant dispersionIn Phase I of this project we demonstrated the potential of DNATraxDNA Tagged Reagents for Aerosol eXperimentsaRandamp DAward winning and FDA recognized technologyable to produce a virtually infinite number of distinctDNA labeled and environmentally safe micro particles that can be used as contaminant simulants both indoors and outdoorsThis paved the way towards a novel framework to informadvance and validate numerical simulations of contaminant transport in both indoor and outdoor settingsTo this endin Phase IIwe will significantly improve the accuracy of our methodologyexpand the considered range of aerosol sizesand demonstrate capabilities of tackling outdoor contaminant transportConsequentlyour specific aims are as followsAimEnhance accuracyrepeatabilityand flexibility of the experimental methodWe will improve several crucial aspects of our methodology for predicting contaminant transportincluding particle releasesamplingand analysisas well as flow characterization using Particle Image VelocimetryPIVand aerosol transport modeling using LESIn particularwe will accurately measure the amount of deposited DNA copies after each release experimentand we will compare with time resolved simulations in which millions of Lagrangian particles are individually tracked using highly efficient parallel super computingAimDemonstrate the capabilities of DNATrax as contaminant simulant in outdoor releasesWe will leverage the unique facilities and expertise at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center to perform open air releases in aacre plot of land monitored by meteorological stationsas well as releases in aft long breeze tunnelIn these large scale deployment of DNATrax we will employ the same experimental methodology which we will have refined in Aimthrough small scale wind tunnel measurementsUsing our teamandapos s top notch computational capabilitieswe will perform highly resolved LES simulations of these large scale release casesincluding the complexities of the filed site terrain PROJECT NARRATIVE The abundance of airborne micron sized pollutants correlates with the prevalence and severity of respiratory diseasesIn additiongrowing concerns on the possibility of terrorist attacks have motivated efforts in preparing for and responding to airborne releases of chemicalbiological or nuclear materials in highly populated regionsIn this work we propose the use of DNATraxa revolutionary new technologycombined with advanced computational fluid dynamics models to precisely correlate the fate of a contaminant with its initial release locationa capability sorely needed to inform and validate the next generation of predictive tools in the area of contaminant dispersion