BANDUNG, itb.ac.id-ITB was visited by special guests from Hong Kong University on Wednesday (15/10/14). The guests are Prof. Ben Young, Prof. Herbert Fang, and Prof. Yuguo Li. In this occasion, they delivered a public lecture at Auditorium Ipteks of East Campus Center ITB at 2 pm of WesternIndonesian Time. The lecture that was organized by ITB and HKU was attended by ITB students, especially those who took Bioprocess, Environmental Biotechnology, and Introduction to Environmental Technique classes. Besides, citizens who worked as environmental experts, students who were working on their thesis, and the scholarship seekers were also invited to the public lecture. At the beginning of the lecture, Prof. Ben Young introduced Hong Kong University to the attendants. 

 

Prof. Herbert Fang delivered the first lecture titled Environmental Anaerobic Technology for Pollution Control and Bio-energy Recovery. Prof. Fang gave a detail explanation about waste water treatment process by biological, chemical, and physical methods. Focus of the lecture was the biological method which utilizes bacteria to degrade the pollutants. One of the biological method that can be selected to treat the waste water is aerobic process. In this process, the treatment is done in the presence of oxygen, which is absolutely necessary for the bacteria's metabolism. Another process of biological treatment method is the anaerobic process which is done in the absence of oxygen. Prof. Herbert Fang stated that anaerobic process is more advantageous than other waste treatment processes, such as produce less sludge and 90% of industrial waste water can be effectively treated by this process.

Recently, Hong Kong University is actively carrying out researches about anaerobic process for wastewater treatment. Prof. Fang has also examined the most effective microorganisms to be used in the process. The method of the research is High-Throughput Screening. The most suitable bacteria to run the process is determined by examining its DNA.  Waste water treatment by anaerobic process has also been developed well. This can be proved by the growing amount of the technology's variety, such as UASB reactor, EGSB and FB reactors, and internal circulation reactor.

The second lecture titled Building Environmental and Influenza was delivered by Prof. Yuguo Li. Subject that Prof. Li experts in is the development of infrastructure that can be related to humans' health. The spesific disease that was explained by the professor was influenza. As we all know, influenza is a disease caused by virus and has been an epidemy since ages. Today's technology is kept to be developed to avoid such problem in environmental health.