Advanced room air distribution strategies for effective airborne infection control

In the context of airborne infection control, it is critical that the ventilation system is able to extract the contaminated exhaled air within the shortest possible time.  In order to minimise the spread of contaminated air exhaled by occupants efficiently, a novel Personalized Ventilation (PV) – Personalized Exhaust (PE) system has been developed, which aims to exhaust the exhaled air as much as possible from around the infected person.  The PV-PE system was studied experimentally for a particular healthcare setting based on a typical consultation room geometry and four different medical consultation positions of an infected person and a healthy person.  The findings are encouraging and the PV-PE system is envisaged to help in the ventilation design of consultation rooms in healthcare centres and hospitals. The advantage of PE for infection control can also be applied in any open area with the presence of an infected person to obtain better infection control as well as better inhaled air quality.

Speaker: Prof. Chandra Sekhar – National University of Singapore