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.

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.