Drop transmission after the impact on woven fabrics

We recently published “Drop transmission after the impact on woven fabrics” in International Journal of Multiphase Flow.

Droplet and drop penetration through a woven fabric surface highly relies on the surface’s geometrical and wetting properties. In addition, the inertia of the incident drop can substantially change the drop penetration dynamics by causing the breakup of a large drop and the transmission of many smaller droplets. This mechanism is present in cloth face masks and could affect their outward protection effectiveness during routine coughing, sneezing, or speaking. A numerical model is employed to study drops’ impact on the simplest one-layer woven fabric wherein adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and the moment-of-fluid method are used to capture the complex interface separating the drop from the surrounding gas and woven fabric. The roles of pore size, hydrophobicity of the materials and impact momentum of the drop are investigated. The results are further used to find a “drop-fabric” relation based on the Weber number for different fabric-woven structures to describe transmitted droplets’ size and velocity distributions. An immediate application of the presented research is the quantification of the fabric mesh weave’s role in preventing the spread of respiratory diseases such as COVID-19.