Uncertainty quantification of bacterial aerosol neutralization in shock heated gases

A potential method for the neutralization of bacterial endospores is the use of explosive charges since the high thermal and mechanical stresses in the post-detonation flow are thought to be sufficient in reducing the endospore survivability to levels that pose no significant health threat. While several experiments have attempted to quantify endospore survivability by emulating such environments in shock tube configurations, numerical simulations are necessary to provide information in scenarios where experimental data are difficult to obtain. Since such numerical predictions require complex, multi-physics models, significant uncertainties could be present. This work investigates the uncertainty in determining the endospore survivability from using a reduced order model based on a critical endospore temperature. Understanding the uncertainty in such a model is necessary in quantifying the variability in predictions using large-scale, realistic simulations of bacterial endospore neutralization by explosive charges. This work extends the analysis of previous large-scale simulations of endospore neutralization [Gottiparthi et al. in (Shock Waves, 2014. doi:10.1007/s00193-014-0504-9)] by focusing on the uncertainty quantification of predicting endospore neutralization. For a given initial mass distribution of the bacterial endospore aerosol, predictions of the intact endospore percentage using nominal values of the input parameters match the experimental data well. The uncertainty in these predictions are then investigated using the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence and polynomial chaos expansion. The studies show that the endospore survivability is governed largely by the endospore’s mass distribution and their exposure or residence time at the elevated temperatures and pressures. Deviations from the nominal predictions can be as much as 20–30 % in the intermediate temperature ranges. At high temperatures, i.e., strong shocks, which are of the most interest, the residence time is observed to be a dominant parameter, and this coupled with the analysis resulting from the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence seems to indicate that achieving confident predictions of less than 1 % endospore viability can only occur by extending the residence time of the fluid–particle interaction.