Summary

In present work, the indoor air quality (IAQ) was deeply analyzed under aspects of its historical evolution, usual problems, current solutions, met hods of analysis and m easurement instruments. After that, the biological air pollution was identifie d as the field to be ex plored with emphasis on the transmission of infectious diseases. The ma jority of the research es in the area focus epidemiological studies of previ ously diagnosed cases and usually they do not present means to estimate the risk of transmission. An altern ative method is proposed based on computer simulation. The model must be capable to ev aluate the transmission process within indoor environments. Although the approach was developed to evaluate the tubercul osis, it can be easily adapted to model the air transmi ssion of other infectious diseases . The studies of the emission of contaminated aerosols, etiol ogy of respiratory diseases, in door aerobiology, microbiology of pathogenic species, particulate aer ial transport, aerosol -air interaction, among others, are the theoretical basis of the proposed model. The model is composed of a set of sub-models; each one for the processes involved in the disease tran smission cycle: the prod uction of contaminated aerosol, the evolution of microbiological viability, the tran sport and dispersi on of biological particles in the air, the turbulen t flow, the heat and mass transfer inside buildings and finally the inhalation and the deposition of the droplets on th e respiratory tract. The model is applied to a simplified 2D situation and the main result is the es timation of the risk of tuberculosis infection. Because of the validation difficulties, a computati onal verification of the model was carried out. Comparisons of several variable profiles with different levels of residuals and computational meshes were performed. The results demonstr ate the great potential of the proposed tool, regarding the dynamics of aerial disease transmi ssion, indoor airflow deta ils, particle dynamics, interaction of air and human body, etc.

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