Conference History

The first workshop dedicated to the topic of Organic Solvent filtration took place in 2006 in Leuven, Belgium. The organization was in the hands of VITO and KU Leuven, both active in the field from its start. The aim was to stimulate exchange of ideas between researchers from academia and industry interested in this new and high-potential emerging field of membrane technology. With about 100 participants, 50/50 industry/academia, this first workshop proved fulfilling an existing need.

The second conference in Leuven in 2008 was organized by KU Leuven as the XXV Summer School of the European Membrane Society. In 2010, Imperial College, another very important player in the field, organized the third conference in London, under the title 3rd International Conference of Organic Solvent Nanofiltration (OSN). In 2013, RWTH Aachen University volunteered to organize the 4th version of the conference: OSN2013. They developed also the conference logo, that we choose to keep for the next conferences. Since OSN2010, these international conferences are also endorsed and partly sponsored by the European Membrane Society (EMS). Appreciating this valuable support, the OSN conference provides a special discount for EMS members.

During the 5th OSN conference in Antwerp in 2015, it was noticed that OSN community is already quite mature and stabilized. To ensure further maintenance of the OSN conferences at the same high level and bright future of this area of membrane separation, it was proposed to establish the Steering Committee from the leading experts from academia and industry who work on OSN field.

The 6th version of the conference, OSN2017 was held in Saint Petersburg, specifically aiming at bringing both industrial testimonies highlighting the process opportunities and level of maturity of the technology, as well as new academic results on modeling, novel applications and promising membrane developments.

The 7th version of the conference, OSN2019 was held in Enschede, NL.

The 8th conference OSN2021-2022 was held in Rennes and for the first time in France. Many talks were devoted to membrane preparation that is always a challenging topic. Few talks delt with the fundamental knowledge of transfer mechanisms and process, highlighting that lot has still to be done in these fields even if industrial applications exist for about 20 years now. Two new open access data bases were presented either for collective project & use (RO and OSN) or for rejection simulation based on neural network training providing a first help for simulation in alcool. All these results suggested a road map for the future researches.

The 9th edition will be held in 2024 (date and location will be given ASAP)