ICU: Ventilation, Design Improvement

ICU Ventilation Design Improvement, Industrial Application

Description

This project models and optimizes ICU ventilation system design using ANSYS Fluent's Discrete Phase Model (DPM), balancing two critical requirements: preventing respiratory disease transmission and maintaining optimal thermal comfort for patients and staff.

The simulation examines airflow patterns and particle dispersion within the ICU environment, modeling the spread of virus-laden aerosols from infected patients and analyzing particle residence time as an indicator of infection risk. Alongside disease transmission, thermal comfort is evaluated using the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) and Percentage People Dissatisfied (PPD) indices, capturing how different HVAC configurations affect occupant comfort throughout the space.

Methodology

Three distinct ICU ventilation designs were evaluated and compared iteratively:

1. A conventional configuration with inlet and outlet positioned on opposite walls

2. A cross-ventilation configuration with strategically placed outlets

3. An optimized configuration featuring a ceiling inlet paired with patient-specific outlets

Each design was assessed for its ability to balance airflow-driven infection control against maintaining stable, comfortable thermal conditions, with inlet and outlet placement adjusted across iterations to identify the configuration offering the best overall performance on both fronts.

Conclusion

This iterative design process reveals the trade-offs inherent to each ventilation configuration, highlighting how airflow pattern, particle residence time, and thermal comfort indices shift depending on inlet and outlet placement. The optimized ceiling-inlet, patient-specific-outlet configuration emerges as the strongest candidate for minimizing respiratory disease transmission risk while preserving favorable PMV and PPD comfort conditions — offering practical, evidence-based guidance for ICU ventilation design, retrofit planning, and infection control strategy in real-world healthcare facilities.