EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF CONTAMINANT CONTROL IN INTENSIVE CARE UNIT: A CASE STUDY OF RAIPUR, INDIA.

Proper ventilation is an important strategy in the practice of infection control. Hospitals are complex atmospheres that require ventilation for thermal comfort of patients as well as control of harmful pathogens infection emissions. The present study is performed on a hospital at Raipur (21.2514° N, 81.6296° E), India, to analyze the avoidance of airborne infections from the mouth of patient to protect the doctor and other patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software FLUENT. Incense smoke is used to for capturing velocity field. Twenty seven (27) cases of simulation were executed using different air change per hour (ACH) (6, 9 & 12) and different inlet and outlet positions talking into account the constant inlet temperature (20 °C). The wall temperatures were taken out from ISHRAE handbook for Raipur region. The velocity vector and capturing the flow field were also performed experimentally. All three turbulence model (Standard, RNG & Realizable) predictions have shown to be in good agreement with the experimental data. It can be effectively employed to validate the extensively used k-e model which was commonly used for ICU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]