Spatiotemporal prediction of sneeze pollutants in enclosed spaces: a CNN-LSTM approach validated by field measurements and CFD-Robotics arm twin system.

Densely populated enclosed environments, characterized by complex thermal stratification and overlapping breathing zones, represent high-risk clusters for the airborne transmission of respiratory pathogens. To address the dual challenges of physical boundary fidelity and prohibitive computational latency in traditional solvers, this study proposes a physics-validated, data-driven framework for the rapid spatiotemporal prediction of sneeze-induced pollutant dispersion. A CFD-Robotics Twin system was developed, utilizing an anthropomorphic manipulator governed by a Transformer-based Imitation Learning policy to replicate non-linear human sneezing kinematics. To ensure rigorous physical fidelity, the simulated flow fields and particle trajectories were validated through a dual-stage experimental benchmark involving anemometer measurements and robotic-arm-nozzle discharge tests. On this basis, a spatial-preserving U-ConvLSTM architecture was developed. By integrating a convolutional U-Net encoder with ConvLSTM layers and symmetric skip-connections, the model maintains absolute physical coordinates (x,y) and bypasses the topological destruction inherent in conventional flattened architectures. Evaluation via mass error