On the Effectiveness of a “Tractor Mounted Road Sanitizing Unit” Designed to Combat COVID-19 Spread

Under the situation of a dreadful spread of COVID-19 throughout the world, it is an absolute necessity to develop proper strategy for its containment. Toward this end, a novel outdoor disinfection system is designed for effective sanitization of long stretches of highways, market places, shopping malls, etc., where there are large traffic and high chances of spreading of the virus. The disinfection system utilizes available tractor powered road tankers of municipal houses, and it has specific features for maximum sanitization coverage. This is achieved through a distributed spraying nozzle mounted around the tank along with two extendable hand sprayers with flexible hoses. The effectiveness of the spray system is studied using an image processing technique. The spray cloud is illuminated by a double-pulsed Nd:YAG laser, and the images are captured using a Nikon D3300 DSLR camera. The average droplet size of the spray coming out from the nozzle is measured, and finally, the area of influence of the spray is obtained from a statistical analysis.