By Shagufta Patel, AFS Chair
Our signature filtration conference, AFS FiltCon, was held completely virtually this year. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our conference chairs Dr. Ashish Bandekar, Dr. Andrew Goodby, Dr. Martin Lehmann and Dr. Jonathan Rajala, as well as Jeni Wong and Ken Winston for their work over the past year for reimagining and recreating this event as a virtual experience.
With two plenary presentations, 42 technical presentations, an expo and a student poster competition, an enormous amount of knowledge was shared over the three days of AFS FiltCon 2021. Learning from each other is one of our primary missions, and we are grateful for everyone who participated. The past year was among the most significant years for filtration due to the world’s need for our products and services, and we rose to the challenge.
Some common themes during the conference included pandemic response, increased demand in the air filtration and water filtration industries, sustainability and the demand on our products to achieve increasingly greater levels of energy efficiency.
We recognized the best new products for 2019 and 2020 with New Product Awards, as well as Honorific Awards:
- 2020 New Product of the Year: Filtration Technology Corporation, for Invicta®, a novel trapezoid shaped cartridge filter element design that builds on the concept of increasing the usable surface area for filtration in a given housing envelope or diameter.
- 2021 New Product of the Year: Porometer, for Porolux™ 50, offering an automated way of determining the First Bubble Point.
- 2021 Engineering Merit Award: Assonic DST, GmbH, Dorstener Wire, for RoSL 700, a continuous filter machine (liquid solid separation), filtering from min 5 μ cut point in a continuous process with low energy input.
- Professor George Chase Academic Research Award: Dr. Ashish Gadhave
- Frank Tiller Award: Dr. Martin Lehmann
- Wells Shoemaker Award: Rob Bender
- Young Scientist Award: Dr. Lin Zhao
- Fellow Award: Dr. Wenping Li
We also held a student poster competition, with the following winners:
- 1st Place: Rana Bachnak (University of Minnesota) - Interfacial Tensions and Film Drainage Times with Surfactant Stabilized Water in Oil Emulsions
- 2nd Place: Ioana-Cristina Butu (Cornell University) - Numerical Simulations for Designing Sieve-free Cross-flow Filtration Systems
- 3rd Place: Sreevalli Bokka (The University of Akron) - Charged Aligned Fiber Yarns
A big thank you to our sponsors and exhibitors: ACS Industries, AEET, Bekaert, Berry Global, Cerex Advanced Fabrics, Filtration + Separation, Gerard Daniel Worldwide, GKD Group, Hollingsworth & Vose, Henkel, IFTS, International Filtration News, Industrial Netting, John Crane, Johns Manville, Lenzing, Lydall Performance Materials, Woven Wire Cloth of MAISHI Wire Mesh, Nanomeld, Nichidai Filter and SWM International. A special thanks to Lydall Performance Materials for also serving as Awards and Student Poster Sponsor.