Portable System Delivers Surgical Quality Air to Any Environment

A novel portable system offers high asepsis and electrical safety conditions, turning any room at a hospital or medical center into a surgical ward or an isolation room.

The Arc Sterile device is an aluminum structure cabin with sliding screen panels and a folding, front opening, polyvinyl door for the entry of patients. Two columns of impulsion and air filtration are used to generate a sterile horizontal laminar airflow. It also incorporates upper and lateral diffuse lighting, and allows the addition of other accessories to improve overall working conditions, such as surgical lamps, a technical bar, computer systems, isolation transformers, an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) to maintain operation for 20 minutes, and other systems as needed.

The laminar airflow tunnel can be direction-switched to fit the workflow of the surgical team and instrumental location. To ensure correct positioning of the surgical field within the airflow, the cabin incorporates a double reference laser linear positioning system.

Users can control the speed of the airflow and alarm level activation (such as saturation of high efficiency particulate arresting (HEPA) filters or need for technical assistance) from a control panel, which also directs the lighting and operating time, as well as displaying information on the devices in use during operation.

The Arc Sterile ensures international standards organization (ISO) 51 air quality in the operative field by performing a double air filtration, the first through a G3 prefilter and the second through a HEPA filter, thus keeping a low level of suspended particles in the air. Just as important as the ultrafiltration are the laminar characteristics and pressure differentials of the airflow, which prevent unwanted particles from mixing with the purified air, maintaining asepsis. The Arc Sterile device is a product of IMEX (Valencia, Spain), and has received the Conformité Européenne (CE) marking of approval.

Three alternatives are available for the basic configuration, each with a different width, with both open (free standing), and closed (set against a wall) modes. The final configuration will depend on the dimensions of the room where Arc Sterile will be located, the type of procedures implemented, and the instruments used during the procedures.

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IMEX