Numerical Simulation on a Horizontal Airflow for Airborne Particles Control in Hospital Operating Room

摘要

Provision of downward unidirectional clean air has been prevalent for decades in modem hospital operating rooms (OR) to protect patients and surgeons from infectious airborne particles and found to be effective in reducing Surgical Site Infection (SSI),its shortcomings were inevitable however.The unidirectional airflow pattern of downward airflow can be easily affected by medical lamps and the thermal plume around wound.This study investigated the alternative provision and the distribution of airflow within an OR,and it also assessed the effectiveness of a kind of horizontal unidirectional airflow to control infectious airborne particles through on-site test and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation method.The investigation is focused mainly on the influence of the medical lamp and the thermal plume with different airflow patterns around the critical zone under the horizontal air supply system.The results show that when the air supply and return facilities are installed on the same lateral wall to keep a horizontal flow ventilation in the OR,medical lamps and the thermal plume have no obvious influence on the horizontal airflow patterns around the critical zone in OR,and performance of air supplying system is highly related to the relative position of the source to the wound.