Numerical study of pollutant dilution in a natural ventilated dental clinic: ventilation path types used for exhausting pollutant

Abstract

A dental clinic was modelled in this study using a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) platform. The objective was to study the effect of natural ventilation on pollutant dispersion in this setting. Three basic ventilation paths were identified, the 'single narrow path', 'narrow path' and 'dispersive path'. The results show that the first of these had the highest efficiency, with an escape time of about 1/30 and 1/100 of the narrow and dispersive paths, respectively. Despite the position of the pollutant source and facilities such as bulkheads, escape time was significantly reduced when the ventilation flow rate was increased under the single narrow and dispersive paths. However, for the narrow path, these factors played a more dominant role in the escape time than the ventilation flow rate. © 2012 IEEE.