Constructing a Transparent Air Chamber for an Innovative Ventilation System in an Operating Room

While surgical techniques have been improving during last decades to the benefit of patients’ safety, infections are still recorded. It is in part due to airborne particles entering the wound during surgery, as a result of the disturbance of the unidirectional flow of clean air (LAF) by the presence of a surgical luminaire system. To prevent this negative interaction, an integrated system of light and ventilation has been designed. However, this system is still conceptual and a mechanical design is needed to prototype the system. Compliance with the European standard on surgical luminaires and the Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) guidelines for operating rooms (OR) have to be checked for this prototype. We thus perform a structural analysis of the air chamber using Autodesk Inventor and SCIA Engineer considering different partitioning scenarios. The impact of each configuration is then assessed by considering the optical performance in the optical simulation TracePro. By comparing shifts in the results to a reference scenario an optimized configuration can be chosen. By consequence, a good balance between optical performance and mechanical strength is determined and leads to an optimized supporting solution. This mechanical design further enables us to build the integrated concept that aims to suppress the negative interaction between light and ventilation in the operating theater.