Digital twin used to simulate the spread of aerosols at GEA site

Ever since COVID-19 began spreading across the globe in early 2020, companies have faced the challenge of protecting the health of their employees and customers. To this end, GEA took decisive action early on, implemented a range of measures across its global sites, such as allowing staff to work from home, significantly reducing business travel and introducing sensible hygiene regulations. As a key step towards ensuring the safety of its workforce, cafeterias at all sites were closed early on to combat the virus spreading. One of these, located at GEA’s largest site in Oelde, Germany, is home to 1,900 employees. After several months of being off-limits, GEA was keen to make the cafeteria available again without jeopardizing staff health and well-being and therefore needed to establish a new set of regulations. The challenge was obtaining technical data that could inform the new safety measures.

“The cafeteria is an important meeting point for our employees and plays a huge role in the social side of work,” explains Erich Nitzsche, Vice President of Engineering Standards and Services at GEA. “We therefore had to ask ourselves under which conditions we could open them up again without putting employee health at risk and considered a number of different scenarios. The missing piece of the puzzle – and an important one at that – was being able to simulate conditions.” To achieve this, we commissioned long-standing software partner, Dassault Systèmes, to perform a professional canteen simulation using the Oelde canteen as the basis location. This required recreating the entire cafeteria as a digital twin to allow for the simulation of airflows (including the entire ventilation system) and the movement of potentially contaminated droplets breathed out by visitors.

The ever-increasing amount of knowledge gained about the ongoing pandemic has revealed that aerosols play an important role in the spread of COVID-19. GEA was therefore keen to understand how the virus could spread through the canteen’s airflows, particularly its heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Dassault Systèmes set out to test various scenarios for reopening the canteens using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate and visualize the space and airflows – the results of which GEA would use to implement an effective risk management strategy.

Using 2D blueprints and images, Dassault Systèmes created an accurate digital twin, mirroring the cafeteria, right down to its air vents and placement of existing tables, chairs and coffee bar. To-scale mannequins were integrated to recreate real-life cafeteria behavior. Incoming and outgoing air conditions and ventilation documentation were used to simulate typical airflow behavior, taking into account natural air leaks at the emergency and entrance doors to the space. The mannequins were placed in diverse scenarios where they breathed or coughed in different areas of the space, demonstrating how the virus could spread in the cafeteria, in the kitchen and on surfaces.