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.

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.

As the new year dawns upon us at AFS, the biggest thing on our minds is the 13th World Filtration Congress (WFC 13), which is only a few months away. It feels dreamlike, as preparations for this event actually started eight years ago right after the 11th WFC in Graz, Austria, in 2012. It had just been announced that WFC 12 would be held in Taipei, Taiwan in 2016, and shortly thereafter the AFS formed a committee to explore a proposal to host WFC 13 in 2020. It’s hard to believe that this event, planning for which started eight years ago, is almost upon us.

The last time WFC was hosted by AFS in the U.S. was in 2004 in New Orleans. Once a country hosts the WFC, it must wait at least 16 years before hosting it again. And while the AFS was eligible to host WFC again in 2020, eligibility alone is not enough to receive hosting honors – after all, the WFC is known as the Olympics of Filtration! There is a bidding war during every WFC,  in which International Delegation on Filtration (INDEFI) organizations from its 12 member countries (Austria, Australia, China, Chinese Taiwan, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Nordics, UK and U.S.) present their proposals to host the next WFC. Following the presentations, INDEFI members hold a vote, with every country getting one vote. INDEFI members are usually representatives from filtration societies from their countries.

Proposals must be quite detailed, and for four years, the core AFS team worked very hard on our proposal. In addition to myself, our team included Chris Wallace, Christine Sun, Klaas De Waal, Lyn Sholl, Wallace Leung, Wu Chen, Rob Bender, Mark Willingham (AFS Treasurer), Todd Furbee and Wenping Li.  We presented at WFC 12 during the INDEFI meeting, along with strong proposals from other countries. I’m remembering with great fondness the moment when it was announced that the American Filtration and Separations Society, representing the United States, would be hosting WFC 13 in San Diego, CA in April 2020. The team was delighted and excited, and it’s not an overstatement to say that every conversation we had with each other after the announcement was about one aspect or another of WFC 13 planning.

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.

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.

Two face mask donations are benefiting the community in Lake Charles, LA, in their battle against Covid-19.

Jiangsu Jiulang High-Tech Co., Ltd., a company of the National Engineering Research Center for Special Separation Membrane of Nanjing Tech University (NJTECH) in China has donated 1,500 KN95 respirators to frontline healthcare workers in Lake Charles, LA.  The donation was not just a gift of assets but also a gift of logistics, because a donation of medical supplies requires an FDA Emergency Use Authorization in order to ship the masks – no quick or easy task.

The KN95 masks have the most advanced membrane air filtration technology, which uses a nanofiber 3D spiderweb structure with a pore size of within 0.1 to 0.5 microns. Filtration efficiencies for 0.3 um non-oily particles is over 98%, and is effective for dust, aerosols, bacterial and viruses. The masks meet GB2626-2006 and En 149-2001 standards for PPE use and will be shipped directly to frontline medical facilities.

The American Filtration and Separations Society (AFS) is pleased to announce the election of seven industry professionals to its Board of Directors. Their terms will begin in September of this year.

Kenneth Winston, Consultant in Houston, TX, has been elected 2nd Vice Chair.

Kenneth also serves AFS as President of the Southwest Chapter. A veteran technical and commercial manager in oil, gas, energy and chemical projects, with business development and process engineering degrees and experience, his career has covered three decades in four dozen countries on six continents.

The American Filtration and Separations Society continues to provide world-class filtration educational programming through our new AFS Learning Center. Taught by filtration industry veterans, AFS Short Courses are well known for their high quality and offer .4 CEU credits for each class. AFS members and attendees to any of our 2020 short course webinars will receive a discount.

During the month of June, AFS will present the following courses:

Thursday, June 11, 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. central time: Liquid Filtration Testing Basics
Thursday, June 18, 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. central time: Reverse Osmosis System Design

Guest blog by Kathleen Owen, ASHRAE Fellow, ETF member and Air Pollution Control Engineer for Owen Air Filtration Consulting

Have you been asked how MERV filters catch PM2.5?  Obviously, it’s easy to go to the ASHRAE Standard 52.2 MERV table and see that a MERV 13 filter is ≥ 85% in the 1-3 µm particle diameter size range.  This is often the answer you need.  Still the questions keep coming, including from ASHRAE SSPCs 62.1 and 62.2.  With ISO 16890 providing an ePM and these ASHRAE committees deciding to specify filters using particulate matter efficiencies, it became clear that ASHRAE 52.2 needed to address this issue.

Surgical masks and respirators are typically made of nonwoven polypropylene fabric and mostly consist of three (or more) layers. The first and third layers are generally spunbond, while the middle layer is meltblown. This composition is commonly referred to as SMS technology (Spunbond/Meltblown/Spunbond).

While the efficiency of face masks is measured by norms defined by ASTM or NIOSH, producers of nonwoven materials need to have insight into the pore size of their material as well.

This document briefly explains how the pore size distribution of these nonwoven materials can be measured using a gas liquid porometer with the ‘pressure scan’ method.

The July meeting of the Southwest Chapter of the American Filtration & Separations Society was held Tuesday, July 14. The speaker was Dr. David Engel of NexoSolutions, who presented on Molecular Separators for Promoting Process Separations in Industrial Applications.

There are a number of different methods for enabling process separations. Depending on the technical and economic objectives at each facility, the method selection may differ. Possible avenues or process separations can vary from mechanical devices to thermal means, and also chemically induced. This presentation discusses certain aspects related to the use of “molecular engineering” to promote or enhance the separation process of solids from liquids and liquid from liquids.

Dr. David Engel, NexoSolutions, has more than 20 years of industrial experience in a variety of areas of chemical engineering and chemistry. David is the inventor in 21 United States Invention Patents and author of over 90 technical papers and conferences. He has worked in several capacities for companies such as Eastman Kodak Company, Eli Lilly and General Electric. David has specialized in materials chemistry, process optimization and new technology development. He is the Managing Director of NexoSolutions and Board of Directors at Exion Systems. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Chemistry and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. David is currently a committee member on the AFS Southwest Region, committee member for the GPA Technical Section M and member of the advisory boards of Gas Processing & LNG Magazine, and International Refining and Petrochemical Conference.

The August meeting of the Southwest Chapter of the American Filtration & Separations Society was held Tuesday, August 11, on the topic of Asymmetrical Cake Filtration on Tubular Elements and the Effects on Scalability. Bradley Moakler, North American Regional Manager for DrM Inc., presented.

Proper design of a solid-liquid tubular element filter requires a thorough understanding of all variables within a process. Most small-scale filtration studies are performed with either a downward flow nutsche pressure filter or vacuum filter due to simplicity and overall space and batch requirements. Although this may produce successful results in terms of quality and throughput, several other factors such as cake homogeneity, particle sedimentation, and cake discharge cannot be effectively assessed which can present inaccuracies in sizing and operating a commercial tubular element filter. This presentation examines the inaccuracies that can develop upon scaling to a tubular element filter.

Bradley Moakler holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Nevada, Reno. After graduating, he worked as a process engineer for three years in the separations circuit at Molycorp, a rare earth mineral processing mine. He is currently working as North American Regional Manager for DrM Inc., a subsidiary of DrM, Dr. Mueller AG Switzerland, and has been with the company for approximately five years. His work mainly involves sales engineering, process development, and business development.