The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the air filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon. To accommodate a wide range of time zones, the virtual conference will take place from 10am to 2pm CST on both days.

The conference includes a keynote address each day:

The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the air filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon. To accommodate a wide range of time zones, the virtual conference will take place from 10am to 2pm CST on both days.

The conference is offering six sessions covering various industry areas responding to the pandemic:

The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the air filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon. The conference has been timed from 10am to 2pm CST, to accommodate a wide range of world time zones.

To drill down into specific filtration areas that are responding to the pandemic, the conference is offering six sessions:

The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the air filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon.

To drill down into specific filtration areas that are responding to the pandemic, the conference is offering six sessions:

The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the air filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon.

To drill down into specific filtration areas that are responding to the pandemic, the conference is offering six sessions:

The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the air filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon.

To drill down into specific filtration areas that are responding to the pandemic, the conference is offering six sessions:

The filtration industry has been thrust onto center stage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Never before have we had to confront so immediately and intensely the power of an airborne pathogen to endanger the lives of millions, rock public health and lay waste to the world economy.

The American Filtration & Separations Society will devote its entire fall conference on December 2 and 3 to the filtration industry’s response to COVID-19: What we have witnessed, what we have learned, and what is on the horizon.

Need a new supplier for a filtration product or service? Let the AFS Buyer's Guide be the first place you look. We have cross-refenced the goods and services of our corporate sponsors into an easy-to-explore catalog.

Our Buyer’s Guide is organized first by primary categories:

The new AFS Learning Center recently announced four two-hour live virtual courses now available for registration. All courses are $195/members and $295/nonmembers, and all employees of AFS Corporate Sponsors (see list here) can register at the member rate.

The upcoming courses include:

Both the North Central and Southeast Chapters of the American Filtration & Separations Society are holding virtual meetings in October. The meetings are an easy way to pick up some specific and valuable knowledge from industry experts. The meetings are free for all AFS members, and just $15 for non-members.

The North Central Chapter will meet Tuesday, October 6, from 10:00 to 10:45 am central time. The topic, “Water Issues in the 21st Century,” will be presented by Peter Cartwright of Cartwright Consulting.

The next meeting of the Southeast Chapter of the American Filtration & Separations Society is scheduled for Tuesday, September 29, from 1:30 to 2:15 pm central time. This virtual meeting is free to AFS members and $15 for non-members.

The topic will be Continuum Approach to Optimizing Downstream Final Drying with Upstream Solid-Liquid Filtration, presented by Barry Perlmutter, President and Managing Director of BHS-Sonthofen Inc.

AFS has a new website! Our new platform for membership, conference registration and abstract submission will be a simpler and more user-friendly experience for all. 

We will launch the much-anticipated Learning Center in the coming weeks. In the Learning Center, you will be able to access virtual courses on demand, past conference proceedings, journal articles and One Minute Filtration articles.

As the rate of technological advance continues to increase exponentially, there are few disciplines that are expected to keep up with as great an amount and variety of needs. Filtration and separations represent one of those disciplines. Our innovations are critical to countless applications in hundreds of industries, from biopharmaceuticals to emission control, from space travel to freshwater scarcity, and from power generation to virus filtration. There is hardly an area on the frontier of technological change that doesn’t depend on filtration and separations.

The International Delegation on Filtration (INDEFI) was founded by filtration professionals in France, UK and the United States and created the first World Filtration Congress in 1974. Its prime mission is to share information and keep up with the increasing problem-solving demands of filtration and separations technology. INDEFI now includes 13 member countries – Austria, Australia, China, Chinese Taipei, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea, Nordics (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden), UK and the Unites States. Held every four years, this gathering is like no other filtration event due to the extraordinary array of technical and educational offerings and based on the number of countries and industries represented among the thousands of attendees.

Now approaching its 13th Congress (September 20-24, 2021 in San Diego), this exceptional technical forum attracts a wide variety of professionals, including scientists, researchers, academic professors, engineers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, end-users, university students of different disciplines and legislators.

While the American Filtration and Separations Society (AFS) is serving as official host of the 13th World Filtration Congress (WFC13), five companies are providing major sponsorships that are making the event possible.

SWM has secured a Diamond Sponsorship. SWM is a leading global performance materials company. Their highly engineered papers, films, nets and nonwovens are designed and manufactured using natural fibers and polymers for a variety of industries and applications. End markets served include filtration, transportation, infrastructure and construction, medical, industrial, tobacco, energy, food services and home décor. SWM and its subsidiaries manufacture on four continents, conduct business in over 90 countries and employ approximately 3,400 people worldwide. For more information, visit www.swmintl.com.

The event’s Emerald Sponsors are Eaton Filtration and Filtration Technology Corporation.

Guest blog by Paul Marold, President of Lydall Performance Materials

Clean air is the most essential resource for life. One could live without food for a few weeks, and without water for a few days; but without air, one would only survive a few minutes, if that.

Only 0.78% of the total water on our blue planet can be used in our daily life. Through water treatment, oceans and other saline water, which account for 97.4% of total global water, have the potential to cover this shortage. Membrane-based technology is the currently favored process for desalination, as it consumes low energy, has low operation cost and has great efficiency.

Commercial membranes are currently made of polymers. These membrane channels are hard to control and therefore have low monovalent ion rejection. Furthermore, some of them have a low tolerance for the chlorine used for sterilization and anti-biofouling. Compared with traditional polymer cross-linked membranes, two-dimensional graphene oxide (GO) based membranes have higher chemical and physical stability. GO nanosheets, which act as an important part, can naturally form a well-packed layer-by-layer membrane structure. This kind of unique membrane structure promotes water permeance via low surface friction while maintaining high salt rejection via edge functional groups of GO nanosheets. Hence, the GO membrane has great potential for industrial water treatment applications. GO nanosheet functionalization can greatly improve membrane performance through channel modification. These characteristics are hard to accurately study via experimental methods because of the nanoscale. Therefore, numerical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are used to zoom into the nanoscale membranes.

Using MD simulation, surface friction of layer-by-layer membrane with various surface oxidation has been widely investigated. Higher surface oxidation has been proved to improve water slip length inside membrane channels. Furthermore, this higher surface attraction can also increase ion adsorption on the surface of channels that additionally increases the ion rejection rate. The edge functionalization on the layer-by-layer GO-based membrane, whose sieving effect has been proposed from experimental works, is rarely studied. It has been reported that edge functional groups have a significant influence on water permeance. Both interaction and geometric effects of edge functional groups were identified with different GO membrane structures. The study of edge functionalization effects is only limited to water transport performance at present. No work about their desalination performance has been reported, although similar researches have been widely studied on single-layer porous GO membranes. In real experiments, however, it’s very hard to prepare membranes with uniform pore size and keep membranes to a single layer structure in atomic thickness. Layer-by-layer membrane structure assembled by functionalized GO nanosheets is much easier. In addition, filtration efficiency can be largely decreased if the pore size is not well-controlled. Therefore, a study of desalination effects of edge functional groups on layer-by-layer GO membrane is still left untouched but necessary to be processed.

Face masks and their availability continues to dominate the news as we cope with the expanding spread of coronavirus in most countries around the world. As filtration leaders, we want to provide a short tutorial on the various kinds of face masks that people are using with the intent to protect themselves and/or others.

A basic rule of air filters is that the more effective they are at removing air contaminants, the more resistant to air flow they are. The air filtration industry has long battled the opposing goals of efficacy and air flow, because as a filter becomes more effective, the greater the energy required to move air through it. In a face mask situation, the more effective (resistant) a filter is, the harder it is to breathe – so you can understand the quandary that we have in developing masks that let in breathing air but not viruses.

The primary danger of wearing a mask that doesn’t do what the wearer thinks it is doing is that it provides a false sense of security, and the wearer might take risks he or she wouldn’t otherwise take, putting themselves or others at risk.