Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to participate and contribute to the 2022 International CFD Challenge on Violent Expiratory Events. The objective of this challenge is to assess the ability of RANS and/or LES to reproduce both the hydrodynamics of a prototypical rapid exhalation mimicking a mild cough and the dispersion of the resulting aerosol cloud in an idealized environment. The impact of turbulence modelling will be determined by comparing selected transport metrics to existing DNS results. Further information about the Challenge can be found at:

https://coughcfdchallenge.wordpress.com/

The important dates are:

October 1, 2021: Challenge Announcement.

October 15, 2021: Challenge starts.

May 1, 2022: Deadline for results submission.

June 27, 2022: Virtual workshop. All teams are expected to participate, present and discuss their results and conclusions.

Fall 2022: Paper submission. The outcomes of the challenge will be presented in a single paper led by the organizers and co-authored by all challenge participants.

The Challenge is open to all the CFD community so feel free to share this announcement with your colleagues.

We hope that this exercise will contribute to a better understanding of the performance of the typically used turbulent transport models and parameterizations for the prediction of short-term dispersion of pathogen laden aerosols generated in violent expiratory events.

Should you have questions or need additional information, do not hesitate to contact us by email at

coughcfdchallenge@gmail.com

Best regards,

The organizing committee

Jordi Pallares, Alex Fabregat, Salvatore Cito and Cristian Marchioli*

Dept. of Mechanical Engineering. Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Tarragona. Spain

*Dept. of Engineering and Architecture. University of Udine. Udine. Italy