| Summary: | In recent years, infectious disease has been a leading cause of death worldwide and one of the more
contagious modes of transmission is through the airborne route. Past research has found that respiratory
aerosols can carry infectious pathogens and are able to remain airborne for up to hours due to their small
size. Hence, this project aims to explore how we can decrease the airtime of aerosols using an external
electric field. This project will serve as a preliminary feasibility check regarding using external electric
field to decreases airtime of aerosols. In this project, we developed a simulation where water droplets
are released into an air channel with an electrode in the middle of the channel. The size of the channel
was varied and the voltage required by the electrode to prevent the droplets from leaving the channel
was obtained. It was discovered that the voltage required increases at an increasing rate as the channel
size increases. When the radius of the channel is 0.02m, 9500V is needed to prevent the droplets from
leaving, but when the radius of the channel is decreased to 0.0025m, only 18V is required. Hence, a
small channel works much more efficiently at trapping droplets. We have also discovered that for a
channel with a radius of 0.075mm, only 1.5V is required to stop the droplets at a horizontal distance of
approximately 0.017mm. This result was compared with the average thickness and pore size of a
surgical mask and the results obtained appears to be feasible. Two other models with two and three
electrodes respectively were also simulated, and it was found that a higher voltage is needed to attract
the droplets for those two models. However, further research needs to be done before we can say that
increasing the number of electrodes will decrease the channel’s efficiency.
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