Coronavirus Hydrodynamics

Abstract

One of the great challenges in chemical engineering is to predict physical properties from molecular structure. Predicting transport properties presents special challenges, especially for macromolecular structures. This thesis focuses on the properties governing momentum transport of coronavirus particle suspensions. Specifically, we focus on how the rotational diffusivity confers elasticity to such suspensions. We first reimagine general rigid bead-rod theory so that it can be used to compare macromolecules of different structures. We do so by imposing a commonized meaning of the characteristic length of a bead-rod structure. Using this reimagined general rigid bead-rod theory, we next examine the viral transport properties of tobacco mosaic virus, gemini virus, adenovirus and coronavirus suspension. We find more closely the coronavirus architecture, and we discover that the rotational diffusivity predicted for a simple well-known virus (tobacco mosaic) agrees with experiment, the detailed structure of a beaded virus matters, and specifically, decreases the rotational diffusivity, and the rotational diffusivity predicted for a spiked virus with a simple polyhedral capsid agrees with experiment. We find that the coronavirus rotational diffusivity decreases with peplomer population, that coronavirus peplomer triangularity decreases its rotational diffusivity, that oblate and prolate pleomorphism increases and decreases the rotational diffusivity respectively, and that hydrodynamic interactions brought on by the coronavirus natural peplomer proximity increases the rotational diffusivity. This work gives thusly a first glimpse into viral macromolecular theory.