Looking for help: CFD of jet flow around a ball: improving PPE design
 

Hiya folks!

I've been working on investigation to look at optimising effectiveness of
Personal Protective Equipment using CFD.

This research not only has discovery aspects, but also aims at developing a
more 'turnkey' innovation-focussed environment [1], based on open-source
software including: OpenFOAM, Gmsh, Paraview.

I'm looking for volunteer help on this project. Oh, I'm currently doing this
solo, with no current university affiliation (trying to find some of these
folks, tho). No small task and quite scary, but you only live once.

For context, we're aiming to ensure urgent health needs are better met if and
when another pandemic occurs, by trying to increase the PPE options available
to use instead of solely masks. More aggressively, we're also trying to reduce
the power (and hence control) that 'Big Pharma' has on both governments and
everyday people (from both ends).

My background includes some research applying CFD to complex flow cases, but
the expected turbulence modelling is new to me. What I can gather is we require
tuning of turbulence parameters (once an adequate model is found). Plus we need
to gather real data from speaking experiments about the fluid dynamics, to
ensure our jet approximation representing a mouth is physically true/valid. Any
advice in this area would be greatly appreciated!

As an aside, I'm familiar with internal struggles that some may face with
regard to self-doubt. I can only say that you won't know, until you DO the
thing first. Then you can decide if you want to continue. Hope this helps in
some way. Peace, Nick

[1] Real-time research agenda and contact details: https://github.com/TessellateDataSci...dOptimisations

The head of WHO recently told us that they have already planned a new pandemic that is expected to be many times more deadly than C19.