Ventilation performance index regarding airborne infection risk control of respiratory diseases

Ventilation indices are widely used to indicate the airborne infection risk of respiratory infectious diseases due to their practical convenience. This study introduces two ventilation indices, i.e., the air utilization effectiveness (AUE) and contaminant dispersion index (CDI), to properly evaluate the airborne infection risk control performance of air distribution. Experimentally validated CFD simulations in a hospital ward with different air distributions, including mixing ventilation, downward ventilation, displacement ventilation, and stratum ventilation, are used to test the introduced ventilation indices. The results recommend the integrated index of AUE and CDI to indicate the overall airborne infection risk and CDI to indicate the local airborne infection risk, compared with the commonly used ventilation indices of the age of ai, air change effectiveness, and contaminant removal effectiveness.