By Bruce Y. Yee, Senior Contributor for Forbes
It doesn’t take a pee-HD to see that urinals aren’t the cleanest things around. But can a urinal flush actually spread viruses like the Covid-19 coronavirus to you? Well, to answer this question in a research letter just published in the journal Physics of Fluids, a research team built a computer model of a urinal. After all, if you are going to build a computer model of anything, it might as well be a urinal.
In case you didn’t get your latest issue of Physics of Fluids in the mail yet, here are the details of the study. The team from Yangzhou University (Ji-Xiang Wang and Xiang-Dong Liu) and Southeast University (Yun-Yun Li and Xiang Cao). They developed mathematical equations to represent the urinal flushing process, which according to the authors involves “significant interactions between the gas and liquid interfaces.” Now, interactions between gas and liquid interfaces may sound like moist farting, but it actually represents how the fluid in the urinal may interact with the surrounding air. In other words, they represented how liquid droplets could spray into the air, causing a mist that then may flow towards, guess what, you.
AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Just five-and-a-half seconds after flushing was initiated, over 57% of the airborne particles generated had already traveled past the the interior–exterior interface (IEI) of the urinal. That’s a fancy way of saying that over half of the spray had made its way out of the urinal. By that time, some particles had reached a height of 0.84 meters. That’s about 2.75 feet. Since Bruno Mars is listed as 5’5” tall, that then would be halfway to Mars. Read more from Forbes.
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