ARIA: near-real-time air quality simulation for operating theatres and clean rooms

BuildWind is a Brussels-based engineering company specialised in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the built environment. Since 2018 we have delivered more than 200 commissioned studies in nine countries.

ARIA brings this expertise into the operating theatre. Airflow and contaminant transport in surgical environments depend on the ventilation design, the equipment layout, door openings and the movement of staff. Conventional Computational Fluid Dynamics captures these effects but is too slow to be used beyond the design stage. ARIA is a fast CFD solver developed specifically for this problem, easily accessible via a smartphone app: it resolves the airflow field and the concentration of airborne particles or contaminants for a given room configuration in near real time, within minutes rather than days, while retaining a physics-based description of the flow. The method has been validated against measured data.

Intended applications include the assessment of ventilation performance in existing and planned theatres, the evaluation of layout and procedural changes on contamination risk at the surgical site, support to commissioning and periodic verification, and integration with building monitoring systems for continuous prediction of air quality during surgical activity.

We are looking for hospitals and surgical centres willing to host pilot applications, manufacturers of surgical ventilation and cleanroom systems and healthcare facility engineering companies interested in integrating ARIA into their offer, research groups active in infection control or hospital ventilation for joint R&D projects (Horizon Europe, EIC, national and regional programmes), and investors or distributors with a focus on healthcare technology in Italy and Europe.