CHPC - Research Computing and Data Support for the University

How HPC Helped the Utah Symphony Keep Its Doors Open During the Pandemic

By Tony Saad and James C. Sutherland

Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Utah

On June 23, 2020, we received an email from Professor Dave Pershing, former president of the University of Utah, asking if we could help the Utah Symphony/Utah Opera (USUO) to analyze the dispersion of airborne droplets emitted from wind instruments at Abravanel Hall (and later Capitol Theater). Thinking of this problem from an engineering perspective, and based on our knowledge of how viral transmis- sion works, a virus attaches itself to a respiratory droplet which is subsequently exhaled into the air. Although large droplets generally settle and lead to surface contamination, small “aerosolized” droplets become suspended in the air and move with it. This means that these aerosols can be modeled as a tracer in a fluid flow simulation. We were excited to help as this aligns closely with our expertise in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

Thanks to the generosity of CHPC in granting us over 600K CPU hours (~68 CPU years!), we were able to run over 25 simulations in total using our in-house code, Wasatch, a component of the Uintah Computational Framework. The first step in our analysis was to understand the baseline configuration of the airflow created by the HVAC in Abravanel Hall’s stage along with a proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. We found significant accumulation of respiratory droplets in the stage area, indicating an increased risk of infection. To mitigate the accumulation of droplets in the baseline configuration, our team considered two “low-cost” mitigation strategies: (1) increasing the volume of air leaving the hall, and (2) rearranging the location of instruments so that super emitter and spreader instruments are located closer to return/exit vents. Combining these led to a decrease in particle concentrations by a factor of 100, a significant improvement over the baseline configuration.

For more information, see our Spring 2021 newsletter here.

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