A New Modelling for the Penetration of Aerosols Through Cracks

Abstract

In studying the several factors that can control the transition and settlement of aerosols, new descriptions are required to have a better understanding of the involved processes. For that matter, a new model was previously established to improve the theoretical description of the deposition of aerosols onto the internal vertical surfaces of small spaces. In this paper, the model’s description is extended to cover the deposition onto the other oriented surfaces, namely the horizontal ones with face up and down. Following that, an application is carried out to analyze the aerosols’ penetration through building cracks. An important new subject is considered, which is the penetration through vertical cracks in comparison to horizontal ones. Previous papers in the literature, never considered vertical cracks’ penetration. The ability of the current model to carry out such comparison comes from the way it is constructed, in which all the three dimensions of a crack are taken into consideration, not just the depth and thickness. The results of the model agree well with the experiments. This indicates the good ability of the developed deposition model in describing aerosols’ penetration through cracks. Penetrations through horizontal and vertical cracks are shown to be clearly different when aerosols of larger diameter than ~ 1 µm are considered.