Detecting Infectious and Biological Contaminants on Aircraft - Is it Feasible?

The spread of disease via commercial airliner travel is a significant and realistic threat. To shed some light on the feasibility of detecting airborne pathogens a sensor integration study has been conducted in this work in addition to computational investigations of the contaminant transport in an aircraft cabin. Our sensor study took into consideration the sensor sensitivity as well as the size, weight and power of commercial off the shelf devices. The computational fluid dynamic simulations were implemented for investigating extreme coughing and sneezing scenarios. The principle finding was that the contaminant concentration is relatively low when compared to the sensitivity available in current state of the art devices. Therefore, this study proposes a novel device/method to detect existence of pathogens. Moreover, it concludes that a collector is also required.