“What we found is the six-foot guideline is effective, but it’s not the only guideline we should be following. The mannequin was also outfitted with a standard medical mask to determine how effective face masks are at reducing droplet dispersal. The researchers used a high-speed camera to track the mucosaliva, examining the puff cloud dynamics of the droplets, landing times, and spatial distribution on a flat surface. The study, funded by a $200,000 grant for Rapid Response Research from the National Science Foundation Division of Materials Research, involved using the spray device inside a 3D-printed mannequin face to expel fluorescent-tagged mucosaliva - made from a combination of water and mucin (large, heavily glycosylated proteins that give mucus its slimy feel) - to imitate a human sneeze. “We created a mechanical device that sprays the droplets and we matched the droplet size and the speed at which they’re being expelled to actual human sneezes.” Brian Chang
“We will go over the science of the droplets and what trajectories they take and what kind of random interactions they might have with each other as they fall and land on surfaces,” Chang says. On Thursday, Chang will present the team’s findings during a Zoom presentation, “The fate of a mucosalivary droplet: Lessons from a synthetic sneeze,” as part of the Fall 2020 Physics Colloquium.
’20, and Trinh Huynh ’21 to study how these particles travel through the air. To better understand how mucosalivary droplets are distributed on surfaces after expiratory events, Chang spent the past several months working alongside Physics Professor Arshad Kudrolli, Ram Sharma ’19, M.A. “The spread is mostly caused by inhaling these droplets, but strangely enough there isn’t much information about where these droplets end up landing on surfaces,” says Brian Chang, postdoctoral researcher at Clark University. While the aerodynamics of such droplets have been the main focus of many studies, little is known about the journey of these expelled droplets and where they come to rest.
The COVID-19 virus is mainly spread through respiratory droplets or small particles that are produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, talks, or breathes. A mechanical spraying device created by physics researchers at Clark University emits mucosalivary droplets during a simulated sneeze.
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