Advanced Strategies for High Performance Indoor Environmental Quality in Operating Rooms (EQUATOR) Project reference: PN-II-PT-PCCA-2011-3.2-1212 Project sponsor: Unitatea Executiva pentru Finantarea Învatamântului Superior si a Cercetarii Stiintifice Universitare (UEFISCDI)
The idea of this project has started during a meeting with the Belgian partner team from the Royal Military Academy in Brussels (RMA), which is developing numerical models for simulating the environment in a high-care facility for severely burned people. The need of a complex experimental validation was put in evidence during several discussions. Such a complex validation would need the reproduction of the Operation Rooms (OR) in a real scale experimental test cell, with similar air diffusion systems and the reproduction of all the flows being in interaction. The objective would be one hand to visualize the path flows and measure the velocity and temperature fields and on the other hand to measure pollutants concentration, especially particular matter dispersion. Of course the reproduction itself of the involved flows would be quite incomplete without using thermal manikins.
(1) Developing a national data base of clinical studies in order to correlate Postoperative Infection Rates (PIR) with the physical state of the hospital building in general and with the air diffusion and ventilation systems from the OR in particular. This data base would be the opportunity of obtaining an evaluation of the real national problem concerning PIR and will allow a multi-criterion assessment considering Organizational Behavior and Ventilation Systems;
(2) Establishing a data base of the main international standards in the field of IEQ related to hospitals environment and extracting a coherent strategy of prescriptions as a basis for several studied conditions in the following parts of the project;
(3) Developing an experimental real scale facility for studying IEQ and ventilation strategies in the OR. This objective includes the development of the one of the UTCB prototypes of thermal manikin into a “patient thermal breathing manikin” with dedicated thermoregulatory system;
(4) Conceiving a smart IEQ monitoring instrument;
(5) Developing CFD models for the human body thermal plume and its environment applied to clean rooms and coupling them with adaptive thermoregulation models, allowing the designing, testing and validation of control strategies involved in containing indoor airborne infections;
(6) Proposing a Good Practice Guide for ventilation strategies in OR for special condition patients.
