Contaminant Removal from Virtual Operation Room

Abstract

Most bacterial contaminants found in operation rooms come from patient’s exhale or from wounds after surgery that make colony forming units. Thus, yearly, a lot people suffer from infections acquired during surgical procedures. Removing pollutants from operation room by investigating the influence of different locations and types of entry and exit grills is the subject of the present work. Equations of fluid flow including the continuity, momentum, energy equations and species equation have been numerically solved by using the FLUENT ANSYS v.14 for virtual symmetric operation room taken in this paper. Turbulent flow of mixture material species is applied in the model of operation room. Standard K-epsilon was used for simulating turbulent flow pattern. The present study aims to find a proper arrangement of inlet and exhaust locations to reduce the unfavorable factors in operation room such us, contamination, humidity, temperature and also air velocity. These factors were achieved according to modification in inlet and exhaust grills arrangement and then simulated through FLUENT software program. Six different arrangements of supply and exhaust were studied to determine case of best health and comfort demands. Case no 5, using local exhaust ventilation, shows good improvement in removing contaminants. However, case no 6 which uses both local exhaust ventilation and like air curtain air supply, shows the optimum removal of contaminants, because it shows lower contamination mass fraction. Meanwhile, the worst contaminant removal were in case 2 and case 1, where source of contaminant exists in low movement zone (dead zones) or region of separation of streamlines. The results showed, using both local exhaust ventilation and like air curtain air supply as in case (6) maintains an average temperature of 21.3 °C, the least amount of particles mass fraction of contaminants 6.36E-08 and moisture content of 0.009.