Natural Ventilation in Hospitals

The aim of this project is to investigate the possibility of using natural ventilation for hospitals, especially for isolation rooms in hospitals. The calculations are based on two cases; Aabenraa Hospital in Denmark and Grantham Hospital in Hong Kong. For both Aabenraa and Grantham hospitals, it was found that with the actual layout of the isolation room, the natural driving forces are not strong enough to ensure a minimum air change rate of 12 air changes/hour all the time. To ensure a high enough air change rate, minor changes of the layout of the isolation room were made, and hybrid ventilation was used. Using local weather data, it was calculated from multizone models that for Aabenraa Hospital the air change rate is below 12 air changes/hour only 6 % of the time and for Grantham Hospital only 5% of the time after the changes. For Grantham Hospital, was a CFD simulation was created to investigate the influence of local mountain and sea breezes. With the changed layout of the isolation room, the average air change rate incorporating mountain breezes was 37 air changes/hour, and incorporating sea breezes was 18 air changes/hour.