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Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by infection of SARS-CoV-2 virus, which can lead to deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome. Since late 2019, COVID-19 has rapidly spread world-wide, and caused the current global pandemic.

The main route of transition of SARS-CoV-2 virus is through the virion-contained droplet and aerosol dispersion and transmission, which come from the exhaled airflow of cough jets from sneezing and coughing of the virus carriers. In this talk, I shall present a systematic modeling study on the in-door air flow characteristics of human cough jets by using large scale multi-phase fluid dynamics modeling and large eddy Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations.

In the past two years, we have conducted large scale (>200 million particles) multiphase SPH turbulence flow calculations to simulate the real size and real time human cough jet development and expiratory droplet dispersion and aerosol formation process, providing the fundamental physical details on the spatial and temporal evolution of human cough jets, shedding the light on social distance policy and prevention measures on future infectious respiratory diseases. In particular, we have studied the effects of two-way coupling, i.e., the coupling between air and droplets, on turbulence structure and duration of the cough jet.