Analysis of Virus Sanitization Alternatives and Optimization of a Thermal Air Purifier for SARS-CoV-2

ENRIQUE E. TARIFA; LIZA DOSSO; CARLOS VERA

Open Journal of Applied Sciences

Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

Lugar: Wuhan; Año: 2022 vol. 12 p. 1152 - 1173

2165-3917

Air sanitization acquired renewed interest during the COVID 19 outbreak, espe-cially for hospital rooms and intensive care units. In this work, a mathematical analysis was done of the convenience of sanitizing the air of whole rooms or per-sonalized isolation tents. Centralized air sanitization was found to have low effec-tiveness due to three reasons: (i) the constant virus emission from patients; (ii) the practical upper limits of air recycle flowrates; (iii) the low value of the mini-mum infective dose of SARS CoV 2. Personalized air sanitization was the best option. Virus inactivation by thermal effect was then revisited, and a steady-state model was formulated for an efficient and personalized thermal sterilizer. An an-alytical solution was obtained for temperature and virus concentration in differ-ent parts of the sterilizer. Cell temperature was found to be the main variable for sterilization due to the Arrhenius-like form of the kinetic constant of virus deac-tivation. A cost objective function was written and subjected to conditions of minimum patient ventilation rate and minimum virus removal effectiveness. Numerical optimization gave an optimal design with the intrinsic advantages of thermal sanitization; i.e., simplicity, robustness, minimum maintenance and high sanitization rate.