Lunch + Learn Online PD Session - Hospital Ventilation Retrofits

The presentation will provide an overview of an ongoing study into the effectiveness of a number relatively simple and cost-effective ventilation retrofits that have been installed across a range of hospitals in a particular Local Health District in New South Wales over the past three years. The key retrofits covered in the presentation include:

a) installation of additional partitioning and doors in wards to constrain infection transmission between occupants/spaces;

b) installation of portable air purification units with HEPA filters; and

c) of negative pressure to rooms/wards in which infectious patients might be located.

The presentation will provide examples of such retrofits in a number of different types of hospital together with numerical simulations of the performance of such retrofits, and field measurements including measurement of tracer gas concentration as a proxy for potential infection transmission risk.

Paul is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Wollongong’s Sustainable Buildings Research Centre (SBRC), for which he served as the founding director from 2010 to 2020. He has over forty years of research experience covering areas such as: improving the performance of buildings with respect to both sustainability and resilience to disasters, renewable energy systems and fundamental topics in heat transfer and fluid dynamics. He has maintained a strong interest in the modelling and measurement of ventilation system performance and collaborated with numerous international experts for over three decades.