A One Health Approach

Air pollution is a major global environmental health risk, causing an estimated seven million deaths across the globe annually. Your challenge is to take an interdisciplinary approach, using both Earth science and health science, and integrate different types of datasets and applications to study the effects of air pollution.

Air Pollutants and Aerosols Indoors

Summary

Simulation of air particles including pollutants and aerosols in an indoor environment.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our aim is to simulate and control how air flows when there is a mix of common air particles and aerosol particles including air pollutants indoors. The simulation models a room (with or without furniture depending on what the user chooses) either closed or with windows or doors open to aid with reopening different sectors as governments around the world ease COVID-19 lockdown measures.

We looked at how air particles spread around in a closed environment in MATLAB, this can be transferred to a web page where users from around the world can add different furniture and change the room, which hopefully gives them an idea of how office rooms can be changed to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, like adding vents or air conditioners to control airflow. Not only can the user choose the room layout, they can also change the air particles' and pollutants' densities, masses, and velocities.

How We Developed This Project

Compared to outdoor air pollution, indoors is more relevant in our current contexts since the COVID-19 outbreak as indoor environments do not allow much airflow. We are using MATLAB, then the code will be uploaded to a public website so the public can freely model their indoors environment. We worked on equations that would simulate the movements of particles depending on their sizes, densities, and velocities. The way they interact with each other based on whether they are a normal particle or an aerosol particle, how they interact with furniture in the room, how they are moved by a ventilation system are all factors we looked at.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used this resource: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/pathfinders/covid-19/environmental-impacts to examine different types of aerosols, e.g. nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and ozone.

Project Demo

N/A

Data & Resources

https://earthdata.nasa.gov/learn/pathfinders/covid-19/environmental-impacts

https://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/78638/E90038.pdf