Assessment of indoor air quality at a university hospital using CFD and GIS

Abstract Because the air conditioning systems in hospital operating rooms, which are among the most difficult work environments in the healthcare sector, require a certain level of quality in the settings, their installation, operation, maintenance, and design have become an important part of engineering applications. The main functions of these systems are air distribution (air velocity, air flow patterns, flow direction), humidification, and filtering (removal of dust particles, bacteria, viruses, and fungi), and these functions serve to preserve the surgical macro and micro settings and provide the ideal conditions to prevent contamination. The factors that affect the design of ventilation systems in operating rooms include surgical lights, medical equipment, and personnel. Among these factors, thermal loads and the presence of obstacles are particularly important. The design of the air flow patterns in operating rooms is crucial for ensuring air quality and providing patients and surgical team members with a healthy environment. Some situations that affect the performance of ventilation systems in hospitals, especially operating rooms, may be listed as the number of employees, door openings and the associated rate of increase in particle concentrations in the environment, corridors, the frequency at which doors are opened and closed, as well as the air flow rate changing depending on this frequency, and operating room contaminations. In this study, particulate matter (PM) measurements were made for PM 0.3 , PM 0.5 , PM 1 , and PM 5 concentrations in Operating Room 19 at Akdeniz University Hospital, which is world-famous for face transplants, in Turkey, and these measurements were analyzed using the GIS (geographic information system) method and the ANSYS CFD (computational fluid dynamics) package program. The results were evaluated from an engineering perspective. Accordingly, it was determined that spatial maps of factors that affect indoor air quality, including temperature, humidity, PM, and VOC, could be produced using the GIS method, and the results could be evaluated better using a CFD package program. It is seen that PM distributions in an operating room could be evaluated from an engineering perspective using the GIS and CFD methods together. The unique aspect of the study is the fact that spatial distribution maps of PM reaching an operating table in an operating room were created, and different analysis techniques were used to investigate relevant parameters.