Operating Room: HVAC

Description

This project simulates the HVAC system of an operating room using ANSYS Fluent, focusing on how the ventilation design manages contamination around the patient and surgical team. The system relies on laminar airflow to keep the room's air clean, with air entering from ceiling panels and moving downward through the space, sweeping contaminants, assumed to originate from the patient's body, toward the room's corners and eventually out through lower exhaust panels. A linear air curtain plays a key role in this process, forming a barrier that stops contaminated air from circulating back toward the patient once it has been displaced. The geometry, representing the hospital room and its HVAC layout, is built in Design Modeler and meshed in ANSYS Meshing with an unstructured grid of 4,137,570 cells.

Methodology

Since the central goal is tracking how pollutants, oxygen, nitrogen, and humidity distribute through the room simultaneously, the Species Transport model is used, solving a separate transport equation for each of these gas-phase components rather than treating the air as a single uniform species.

Analysis

The solution yields contours of velocity, pressure, temperature, and species mass fraction for both oxygen and contaminants, along with 2D velocity vector fields. The temperature contours confirm that incoming conditioned air successfully cools the region around the patient's body, which is a strong heat source, indicating the cooling function of the system is working as intended. The velocity vectors show fresh air descending from the ceiling panels and spreading sideways as it reaches the room, a pattern that initially carries contaminants toward the patient's surface before the air curtain intervenes, generating a strong flow barrier that redirects the contaminated air toward the room's sides and ultimately to the outlet panels rather than letting it return to the patient. The contaminant mass fraction contours track this same pattern closely, confirming that the HVAC system, once the air curtain effect is accounted for, effectively clears contaminants from the patient's vicinity and channels them out of the operating room.