Propagation of Mouth-Generated Aerosols in a Modularly Constructed Hospital Room

Abstract

Modular construction methods have been widely used in the civil engineering industry due to ease of assembly, the convenience of design, and allowing for flexibility in placement while making the construction more sustainable. With the increasing number of COVID-19 cases, the capacity of the hospital is decreasing as more intensive care units (ICU) are allocated to COVID-19 cases. This limited capacity can be addressed by using modular construction to provide field hospitals. This paper adopts transient Lagrangian computational fluid dynamics simulations to investigate the importance of having an appropriate ventilation system in place to ensure sustainable infection control against airborne viruses and pathogens within a modular room. The performance of having a ventilation system using 10, 20, and 40 air changes per hour (ACH) was examined. In addition, different room configurations were also compared to provide useful guidelines for air conditioning units placement. It was determined that as the ACH rate increases while maintaining a direct flow field between the inlet and outlet, the rate of aerosol removal increases. Furthermore, the flowfield in which can be controlled by the placement of the inlet and outlet can impact the removal of aerosols, as it dictates how far the droplets travel before being removed from the enclosure.

Analysis of parameters influencing pathogen concentration in a room with displacement ventilation using computational fluid dynamics and Taguchi methods

“…Ventilation is a critical engineering solution to minimize the infection risk in the indoor environment. Many researchers have suggested that increasing the amount of fresh air given to the buildings from the ventilation systems decreases the infection risk in buildings [8][9][10][11]. Since the early 2000s, there has been an increase in studies examining the effect of indoor ventilation on airborne transmission.…”

“…With the 2002-2003 SARS virus epidemic, the focus on this area increased, and with the pandemic that occurred in 2019, studies in this area have diversified significantly. In addition to different interior spaces such as classrooms [12,13], offices [14,15], restaurants [9], hospital rooms [8,16], ophthalmology clinics [17], dental clinics [18], and aircraft [19][20][21], bus [22,23] and train cabins [24,25], different topics such as exposure type and severity [26], and social distance [27,28] have been studied by many researchers. Most of the studies are parametric, and it is aimed to find a scenario that will minimize the risk of contamination according to the title examined.…”

“…Most of the studies are parametric, and it is aimed to find a scenario that will minimize the risk of contamination according to the title examined. There are also studies in which the most suitable parameters are tried to be obtained by changing the inlet velocity [8,12], relative humidity [29,30], ventilation type [14,28,31,32], and inlet or outlet positions [15]. The results obtained from these studies are very important so that the existing systems can be used to minimize the infection risk.…”