Conference Report
Hanbat National University, Korea

Sae-Eun Oh

With the recommendation of Korean Society ofEnvironmental Engineers and thankful supports by theoverseas member invitation program, I could attend
the 49 th Annual Conference of Japan Society on Water
Environment successfully held in Kanazawa University
from 16 th of March to 18 th of March. It was sincerely
my great honor to get the JSWE-IDEA water
environment international invitation award and give a
presentation at the conference and I really appreciatedthe JSWE and all the people who help and support me.
Since I became a researcher, I have been trying toattend various international conferences being heldin across the world. Among them, I should admit
that, JSWE is one of the most informative and activeconferences. Every year, conference was always full ofinteresting and cutting edge topics related to not only
water treatment area but also all environmental areas.
During conference I could meet and communicate
with many researchers from Japan, China and othercountries. Sharing knowledge and experiences wasanother privilege for the conference attendance.
Those experiences and communications have provided
me various opportunities to broaden and polish
my research area and to keep my active research
momentum.
My main research area is environmental related
processes, especially biological wastewater treatment（nitrogen and phosphorous removal）and anaerobic
digestion process. I have been involving in various
research projects for the developments of effective
biological wastewater treatment processes. In special,recently I have been trying to develop the effective
anaerobic digestion process such as dry anaerobic
digestion, ultrasonicator attached anaerobic digester
etc. to improve the anaerobic digestion performance ofVol. 38（A） No. 6（2015）

livestock waste, sewage sludge and foodwaste etc.
In the conference, I was given a chance to sharemy recent works which is related to new applicationof ultrasonication as a tool of enhancing anaerobic
performance by activating microbial communities. My
presentation（title of“Effects on the physico-chemical
characteristics of microbial granules in low sonication”）
was mainly about positive effects of ultrasonication on
anaerobic granules and elucidating the positive effectthrough physico-chemical approaches. The physicochemical characteristics of anaerobic granules are oneof the most important properties for the successful
operation of upflow anaerobic sludge blanket, since
they could directly affect the substrate and nutrienttransportation into granules. As presented, thephysico-chemical changes of ultrasonicated granules
such as increased permeability（37％）and increased
specific surface area（230％）seem to be very
supportive of the fact that low strength ultrasonication
positively affects the methanogenic granules towardhigher AD performance. Because the penetrationof nutrient and substrate into granules could beenhanced, and then more favorable conditions seemed
to be expected to the ultrasonicated granules toward
to the higher anaerobic performance.
Even though the conference was just ended, I myself
already look forward to attending next conference. I
sincerely hope that our relationship between Korea andJapan should be prolonged and even more tightenedfor the advances of environmental area in Asia.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to the citizens ofKanazawa for supplying hospitality and easiness to ourfamily during conference periods.
Thank you again and hope to meet you all at nextconference. Bye now.

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