Performance Evaluation of Industrial Air-Shower in Removal of Gas- and Liquid-Phase Contaminants from Human Body

Green Asia StrategyIn scenarios of terrorist strikes or severe disasters involving the dispersion of nuclear, biological, or chemical pollutants, rapid and effective decontamination and removal of such contaminants from the human body become critically important tasks during rescue operations. Because of the limitations of the globally used wet and dry decontamination processes from the viewpoints of processing speed and large size of the device required, this study developed a wind decontamination system in which forced convective flow is applied against the human body surface, similar to an industrial air-shower system. This study evaluated the decontamination performance of a prototype air-shower system with the aim of verifying the industrial feasibility of the wind decontamination system. Fundamental experiments were conducted to investigate the contaminant removal efficiency of the air-shower system by using hypothetical liquid-phase (pure liquid water) and gas-phase (SF6 gas) contaminants. The results revealed that the removal efficiency for the gas-phase contaminant could exceed 90% within a 30-s purging time duration in the decontamination process. A corresponding CFD simulation of the experimental setup was also carried out, and the contribution ratio of each air supply inlet opening of the air-shower system was discussed