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Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems
The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus has overwhelmed hospitals with patients in need of intensive care, which is often limited in capacity and is generally reserved for patients with critical conditions. This has led to higher chances of infection being spread to non-COVID-19 patients and healthcare...
Autores principales: | , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
AIP Publishing LLC
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8939549/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35342279 http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/5.0081291 |
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author | Arjmandi, Hamed Amini, Reza Kashfi, Mehdi Abikenari, Matthew Alexander Davani, Ashkan |
author_facet | Arjmandi, Hamed Amini, Reza Kashfi, Mehdi Abikenari, Matthew Alexander Davani, Ashkan |
author_sort | Arjmandi, Hamed |
collection | PubMed |
description | The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus has overwhelmed hospitals with patients in need of intensive care, which is often limited in capacity and is generally reserved for patients with critical conditions. This has led to higher chances of infection being spread to non-COVID-19 patients and healthcare workers and an overall increased probability of cross contamination. The effects of design parameters on the performance of ventilation systems to control the spread of airborne particles in intensive care units are studied numerically. Four different cases are considered, and the spread of particles is studied. Two new criteria for the ventilation system—viz., dimensionless timescale and extraction timescale—are introduced and their performances are compared. Furthermore, an optimization process is performed to understand the effects of design variables (inlet width, velocity, and temperature) on the thermal comfort conditions (predicted mean vote, percentage of people dissatisfied, and air change effectiveness) according to suggested standard values and the relations for calculating these parameters based on the design variables are proposed. Desirability functions that are comprised of all three thermal condition parameters are used to determine the range of variables that result in thermally comfortable conditions and a maximum desirability of 0.865 is obtained. The results show that a poorly designed ventilation system acts like a perfectly stirred reactor—which enormously increases the possibilities of contamination—and that when air is injected from the ceiling and extracted from behind the patient beds, the infection spread is least probable since the particles exit the room orders of magnitude faster. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8939549 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | AIP Publishing LLC |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-89395492022-03-22 Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems Arjmandi, Hamed Amini, Reza Kashfi, Mehdi Abikenari, Matthew Alexander Davani, Ashkan Phys Fluids (1994) Articles The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus has overwhelmed hospitals with patients in need of intensive care, which is often limited in capacity and is generally reserved for patients with critical conditions. This has led to higher chances of infection being spread to non-COVID-19 patients and healthcare workers and an overall increased probability of cross contamination. The effects of design parameters on the performance of ventilation systems to control the spread of airborne particles in intensive care units are studied numerically. Four different cases are considered, and the spread of particles is studied. Two new criteria for the ventilation system—viz., dimensionless timescale and extraction timescale—are introduced and their performances are compared. Furthermore, an optimization process is performed to understand the effects of design variables (inlet width, velocity, and temperature) on the thermal comfort conditions (predicted mean vote, percentage of people dissatisfied, and air change effectiveness) according to suggested standard values and the relations for calculating these parameters based on the design variables are proposed. Desirability functions that are comprised of all three thermal condition parameters are used to determine the range of variables that result in thermally comfortable conditions and a maximum desirability of 0.865 is obtained. The results show that a poorly designed ventilation system acts like a perfectly stirred reactor—which enormously increases the possibilities of contamination—and that when air is injected from the ceiling and extracted from behind the patient beds, the infection spread is least probable since the particles exit the room orders of magnitude faster. AIP Publishing LLC 2022-03 2022-03-02 /pmc/articles/PMC8939549/ /pubmed/35342279 http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/5.0081291 Text en © 2022 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ). |
spellingShingle | Articles Arjmandi, Hamed Amini, Reza Kashfi, Mehdi Abikenari, Matthew Alexander Davani, Ashkan Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
title | Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
title_full | Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
title_fullStr | Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
title_full_unstemmed | Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
title_short | Minimizing the COVID-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
title_sort | minimizing the covid-19 spread in hospitals through optimization of ventilation systems |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8939549/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35342279 http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/5.0081291 |
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