Grant: Alliance Grants

The upsurge of the COVID-19 pandemic has already created dreadful societal and economic impacts across the globe. This pandemic and its consequent effects will likely present a range of challenges to the healthcare infrastructure and could become a major societal threat in Canada. As the surge of COVID-19 positive patients is on the rise, Canada would require to set up COVID-19-related field hospitals in places of public assembly. In the wake of this pandemic, there is an increasing need for patient intensive care units and infection isolation rooms to protect health care workers and other patients from getting sick. The proposed research aims to develop a framework for designing and constructing temporary healthcare facilities, HealthBoxes, which can be shared and used across Canada to identify, procure, and deliver modular healthcare facilities that match the evolving treatment requirements to combat the virus. Using the advantages from high fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical models, this study will track and visualize the spread of droplets through patients' coughs and sneezes to facilitate an efficient design of modular healthcare facilities. Detailed finite element models of the different HealthBox geometry will be developed and analyzed to optimize the design and make the HealthBoxes easier to operate and less vulnerable to operational disturbances. Combining the expertise of the applicants along with the experienced industry partners from both consultant and construction industries, this project will develop an innovative approach to design and construct a code-compliant solution, "HealthBox", to combat the limitation of health care space during this pandemic. The proposed solution will not only provide guidelines for our Canadian Health system towards the current pandemic and its mutated waves, but it will also be useful for future circumstances other than viruses, such as natural disasters (e.g. floods, hurricanes and earthquakes).