Isothermal Evaporation Rate of Deposited Liquid Aerosols and the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Survival

Pavel S. Grinchuk; Katya I. Fisenko; Sergey P. Fisenko; Svetlana M. Danilova-Tretiak

doi:10.4209/aaqr.2020.07.0428

Isothermal Evaporation Rate of Deposited Liquid Aerosols and the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Survival

Pavel S. Grinchuk This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Katya I. Fisenko, Sergey P. Fisenko, Svetlana M. Danilova-Tretiak

A.V. Luikov Heat and Mass Transfer Institute, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, Minsk 220072, Belarus

Received: July 22, 2020
Revised: November 4, 2020
Accepted: November 4, 2020

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2020.07.0428

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Cite this article:

Grinchuk, P.S., Fisenko, K.I., Fisenko, S.P., and Danilova-TretiakSvetlana, M. (2020). Isothermal Evaporation Rate of Deposited Liquid Aerosols and the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus Survival. Aerosol Air Qual. Res. https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2020.07.0428

HIGHLIGHTS

The evaporation rate of a liquid droplets on a substrate can aﬀects coronavirus survival.
Evaporation rate of droplets depends on thermal conductivity and thickness of the substrate.
The lifetime of evaporated droplet increases with increasing of relative humidity of air.
Huge hydrostatic pressure is generated at the final stage of droplet evaporation.
Gradients of hydrostatic pressure in evaporating droplet cause damage to coronavirus.

ABSTRACT

It is shown that the evaporation rate of a liquid sample with the height is about several millimeters containing the culture of coronavirus aﬀects its survival on a substrate. Possible mechanisms of such inﬂuence can be due to the appearance of large, about 140 bar, non-comprehensive capillary pressures and the associated dynamic forces during the movement of the evaporation front in an aerosol with the virus. A simulation of isothermal evaporation of a thin liquid sample based on the Stefan problem was performed. Evaporation time of the same aqueous sample is practically twice shorter for stainless substrate than for plastic one. The comparison of simulation data and recent experiments on the coronavirus survival on various surfaces showed that the rate of isothermal evaporation of aqueous samples, which is higher for heat-conducting materials, correlates well with the lifetime of the coronavirus on these surfaces. Ceteris paribus, the viral culture should die faster on more thermally conductive and thinner substrates, as well as in lower relative humidity environment, which provide a higher evaporation rate.

Keywords: SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus; COVID-19; Vitality of coronavirus; Droplet evaporation; Substrate; Thermal conductivity.