Covid-19 Modular Construction

ABSTRACT

Modular construction methods have been widely used in the civil engineering industry as they provide ease of assembly, convenience of design, and allowing for flexibility in terms of placement. With the increasing number of COVID-19 cases, hospitals’ capacity is decreasing as more intensive care units (ICU) rooms are allocated to those cases. The limited capacity can be overcome by using modular construction to provide field hospitals, to accommodate more patients. This paper adopts transient Lagrangian computational fluid dynamics simulations to investigate the importance of having an appropriate ventilation system in place to achieve containment of contaminants within a modular construction room. The model was validated using the results from the experimental simulation of aerosol in an airconditioned space. The performance of having 10, 20, and 40 air changes per hour (ACH) was examined for a room with a geometry of 6.1 × 2.5 × 3.0 m. It was observed that the rate at which the mouth-generated aerosols were filtered towards the ventilation system (outlet) increased by 137% by increasing the ACH from 10 to 40. Aerosol particles landing on equipment decreased by 25% when the rate was increased to 40 ACH. © 2022, Canadian Society for Civil Engineering.