Development of a Laminar Air Flow System for Preventing Surgical Equipment Table Infections

Abstract

Nowadays, the infections cause the higher patient mortality and longer time in hospitals and clinical treatment units. It requires the good quality of healthcare services. This paper presents the research in an attempt to realize a mobile laminar airflow system for preventing the contamination of airborne pathogens by protecting the surgical site area as well as the instrument table as low-cost as possible. The portable laminar airflow system and centrifugal fan are modeled by using computer-aided design (CAD) software. This system concludes a blower, UVC lamp, standard filter, high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, and instrument table. Then, the proposed device was verified through numerical simulations. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was performed to optimize the system design by examining and evaluating the results, as well as computing the aerodynamic characteristics for the system's centrifugal blower and taking fan pressure variation into account while adjusting inlet flow. As a result, sterile conditions may be created instantaneously and anyplace using this proposed laminar airflow system. The innovative layered airflow sterilizer may achieve a local Biosafety Level II in a specific area, such as an isolation room, patient bedroom, or operating room. After modeling the system, the finer mesh of centrifugal fan was carried out to ensure the accuracy of numerical simulation. There are four domains discretized in a centrifugal fan such as impeller fluid domain, volute fluid domain, inlet, and outlet fluid domain. The inlet mass flow rate strongly affects the performance of the centrifugal fan. The numerical results show that the total pressure maintained inside the blower increase as the flow rate gets larger. The results of this study provide an essential basis for optimizing system design in future investigations.