Development of a visual Basic 6.0 based smart application for the design and selection of local exhaust ventilation systems

Introduction: Air pollution in industrial work environments has adverse effects on worker health, for example, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma. These diseases impose direct and indirect costs on society. In hierarchy controls, local exhaust ventilation is considered an "engineering control" to remove or control contaminants released in indoor work environments. It is one of the preferred ways to control employee exposure to air contaminants. The purpose of this research is to development a smart application for designing, selecting local exhaust ventilation systems.   Methods: At the first stage of this action research, was a developed visual Basic 6.0 based smart application for the design and selection of local exhaust ventilation systems. Then, for validation this application results obtained by the application were compared with the benchmarks. SPSS 22 software was used for statistical analysis and Bland–Altman plot was used to examine the agreement between the results Results: Among the parameters, the maximum difference between similar results of the application and benchmark data was related to static pressure, which was 5% different in one series branch, which was balanced with another series branch. And the minimum difference was related to the calculated diameters with zero percent difference. . Bland – Altman plot showed that the standard deviation of the results of the four static pressure, velocity pressure and total pressure is in the range of (± 2 SD). Conclusion: The application developed in this research has acceptable accuracy and its error is less than 5%