The maintenance of an optimal thermal environment is regarded as a priority for newborn babies. While healthy neonates are able to regulate their body temperature, premature and small infants may have difficulties adapting to temperature changes. For this reason, keeping an optimum environmental temperature is essential for their healthy development and even survival.

This paper reviews some of our recent applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to model heat and mass transfer processes in neonatology, and investigates the most relevant heat and mass transfer mechanisms taking place in medical devices such as incubators, open cots and oxygen hoods. The numerical simulations are validated through comparison tests with experimental results and measurements from the medical literature. It is shown that CFD simulations are very flexible tools that can take into account all modes of heat transfer in assisting neonatal care and the improved design of associated medical devices.