A High-Efficiency Simulation Method for Analyzing the Impact of Exhausted Air from COVID-19 Hospitals and high risk facilities
By - Jatin Kumar 9th May 2020
By the middle of May 2020, the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 has affected many countries around the world. The cumulative confirmed cases in India has Crossed over 60,000, and currently the doubling rate in India is around 10 days which means, we can see a peak in India around July.
A large number of patients will result in great pressure on the existing medical systems of several states. In response to the shortage of medical resources, some government agencies both at Central and state level began to build temporary hospitals quarantine zones for centralized treatment of the Coronavirus patients.
For example, ITBP constructed two new COVID-19 temporary hospitals, and railways have turned their Bogies into isolation beds.
This transformation is being observed across the world.
But very less attention paid and research has been done on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) design of these hospitals, negative air pressure system as special exhaust system must be utilized to discharge the harmful air emitted by patients.
The harmful air needs to be exhausted to higher altitude so as to prevent the virus from spreading to the unpolluted areas in the hospital. While the exhaust system is generally equipped with filter devices for the harmful air, there is still a certain degree of infection risk after the harmful air is discharged through the air outlets. I enquired with several doctors who worked in SARS virus in 2003 in UK and conducted in-depth research on its transmission mechanism.
The research results indicate that if the air emitted from a SARS patient is diluted by more than 10,000 times using clean air, it would result in a low risk of infection. On the basis of this research, if the actual situation of the COVID-19 hospitals, quarantine zones and isolation facilities can be considered in the simulation of the dispersion process of exhausted air in outdoor environment, the infection risk caused by the harmful air can thus be quantitatively evaluated, which will provide designers with more specific reference during the design of such hospitals.
It must be noted that because the designs and constructions of Covid-19 Hospitals, are emergency transformation, it must be completed in 10~20 days, just a few hours are allowed for the simulation and analysis of the impact of exhausted air on the environment. As a result, conventional analysis methods could not meet the special emergency needs of such projects, and the simulation method with both high accuracy and high efficiency were greatly in need.
To address the above mentioned difficulties, with the support of a highly skilled team, which proposed a high-efficiency simulation method for analyzing the impact of exhausted harmful air from COVID-19 temporary hospitals. Powered by the open-source computational-fluid-dynamics softwares and cloud computing plat, the proposed simulation method with both high accuracy and high efficiency can assist engineers to quickly investigate the spatial distribution of the exhausted harmful air from the temporary hospital, thereby enabling designers to complete the HVAC design in a truly short time.
There's a lot of analytical work based on the proposed simulation method, including analyzing the concentration distributions of the exhausted harmful air around these two hospitals (some typical visualisations of the simulation results can be seen from photo, verifying the designed heights and locations of air outlets and fresh-air intakes, and quantitatively evaluating the risk of fresh-air intakes being polluted by exhausted harmful air from air outlets, to assist the engineers to complete the designs of these Covid-19 hospitals, quarantine zones, isolation facilities in short time.
Typical visualizations of the simulation results of (a) Covid-19 Hospital in Delhi and (b) Covid-19 hospital in Mumbai
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Jatin Kumar is Managing Director of SSVG, An Infrastructure Company , Leasing Partner to Oyo Rooms , Subcontractor to Larsen and Toubro, Cofounder- Gyanshetra.com, Advisor to Think Tanks , Public Policy Expert, Affordable Housing leader, Real estate Developer, PGDM ( MBA) IIMKsp, B.E.( Civil Engineering)- Delhi College of Engineering, Delhi University