HVAC Control Systems for a Negative Air Pressure Isolation Room and Its Performance

Hamdani Hamdani (), Fajar Salamul Sabri, Harapan Harapan, Maimun Syukri, Razali Razali, Rudi Kurniawan, Irwansyah Irwansyah, Sarwo Edhy Sofyan, Teuku Meurah Indra Mahlia () and Samsul Rizal
Additional contact information
Hamdani Hamdani: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Fajar Salamul Sabri: Graduate School of Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Harapan Harapan: Medical Research Unit, School of Medicine, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Maimun Syukri: Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Razali Razali: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Rudi Kurniawan: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Irwansyah Irwansyah: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Sarwo Edhy Sofyan: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia
Teuku Meurah Indra Mahlia: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia
Samsul Rizal: Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Syiah Kuala, Banda Aceh 23111, Indonesia

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 18, 1-17

Abstract: The controlled environment room, called an isolation room, has become a must have for medical facilities, due to the spreading of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), to isolate the high risk infected patients. To avoid the transmission of the virus through airborne routes, guidelines were published by the government and the association. A medical facility must comply with this document for high-risk patient treatment. A full-scale N class isolation room was built at Syiah Kuala University to investigate the performance in terms of the controller, temperature, pressure, humidity, and energy consumption. The isolation room was equipped with a proper capacity heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) system, which consisted of an air conditioning compressor and a negative pressure generator (NPG), and its installation was ensured to fulfil the guidelines. Since the current NPG was controlled manually, a computer-based control system was designed, implemented, and compared with the manual control. The results showed that the computer-based control outputs better stability of pressure and electric power. For that reason, a computer-based control was chosen in the real case. To investigate the performance of the isolation room, a 24 h experiment was carried out under different parameter setups. The results showed that improvement of the control strategy for temperature and humidity is still necessary. The energy consumption during the activation of the NPG for the recommended negative pressure was slightly different. An additional piece of equipment to absorb the heat from the exhaust air would be promising to improve the energy efficiency.

Keywords: isolation room; control system; temperature; negative pressure; HVAC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/18/11537/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/18/11537/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:18:p:11537-:d:914802

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().