Numerical Analysis on Modelling Thermal Comfort Minor Operation Theatre

Abstract

An operation theatre (OT) is a special room inside the hospital where medical surgery is carried out by a surgeon with the help of medical personnel. Technical standards or requirements which have been set for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) inside an operation theatre is important not only for the comfort of surgeon, patient, and medical personnel, but also to reduce the risk of surgical site infection during surgery. This research focus on Minor Operation Theatre (MOT) which is dental surgery room at Universiti Malaysia Perlis Health Centre with room dimensions of 2.89 m(H)×3.12 m(W)×3.4 m(L) is used for numerical analysis. The air flow supplied to the MOT is from single unit air-conditioning system. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis is a part of an investigation to determine the air flow and temperature distribution inside the MOT. A simulation conducted by using ANSYS Fluent only consider dry air inside MOT. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to compare and analyze the simulation of dry air conducted with previously obtained experimental data of humid air distribution inside the MOT. The comparison of humid and dry air temperature throughout the MOT shows that the difference is 25.3%. The average temperature of humid air inside the MOT is 21.8 ºC while for dry air is 16.3 ºC. Moreover, the cooling capacity of humid air and dry air are 2.23 kW and 1.64 kW respectively. Thus, the difference between humid air and dry air-cooling capacity is 26.5%. However, the dry air simulation and humid air simulation is the same if only the process is considered as simple cooling.