October 19, 2004 —
Viterbi School of Engineering faculty are participating in the sixth international
Conference on Biofiltration to address the development and use of biofilters and
other state-of-the-art biological air pollution control technologies to keep the
air clean.
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Biofiltration system for wastewater treatment in Ojai, CA.
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The conference, being held in Redondo Beach, Calif., Oct. 20-22, provides academic
and industrial researchers, industrial and municipal customers, regulatory personnel,
vendors and equipment manufacturers with updated information on emerging technologies,
such as biofilters, that are used in air pollution treatment programs.
“Biofilters are biological reactors that are used to capture and degrade air
pollutants,” said conference organizer Joseph Devinny, a Viterbi School professor
of civil and environmental engineering. “They are essentially large tanks filled
with a porous medium, like soil or compost, on which a diverse wet biofilm of
microorganisms grows. When contaminated air is passed through the medium, contaminants
are transferred to the biofilm, where they can be biologically degraded.”
Keynote addresses and panel discussions will address topics such as biofilter
performance through modeling, process design and scale-up, remediation, odor control,
biotrickling filters and bioscrubbing technologies, regulatory and economic issues.
This year’s agenda features 35 presentations from from experts in the U.S., Canada,
France, the Czech Republic, China, Korea and Mexico.
The conference is sponsored by USC, the university’s Center for Sustainable Cities
and The Reynolds Group, an environmental consulting and contracting company specializing
in biofiltration systems. For conference information, visit http://biofilterconference.org.
