CulliganMan

How Reverse Osmosis Water Purification Works

With environmental friendliness becoming an important part of everyday life, we often find little things that we can do that make a difference, especially when building or remodeling homes. When you have the chance to upgrade your systems to be more environmentally friendly, you take that option. With the scare of harmful contaminants in our drinking water, it is becoming more and more important to drink filtered water. A great way to do this while remaining green, is reverse osmosis purification.

Reverse osmosis removes 99% of pharmaceuticals and dissolved contaminates such as arsenic, sodium, lead, and more. The Process of reverse osmosis starts with the water from a liquid with a high concentration of dissolved solids being pushed to flow through a semi-permeable membrane, the heart of the reverse osmosis system, to the low concentration side where this water can be collected. The process is achieved by applying pressure on the liquid to overcome the natural osmotic pressure forces on a membrane.

The semi-permeable membranes used in the process are engineered to only allow the passage of the water molecule. The semi-permeable membrane allows water molecules to pass through while blocking larger molecules. Water molecules penetrate the thin layer of the membrane and diffuse through it molecule by molecule. Dissolved salt ions do not diffuse through this layer because the solubility of the salt ions is much less than that of the water. Thus, the water moves through more readily and separation from the other molecules present occurs. The driving force is furnished by both the pressure and the concentration differentials across the membrane. For water, the pressure effect is the most important, and for dissolved mineral ions the concentration difference is most important. Therefore, increases in pressure increase the product water flow without a corresponding decrease in the quality of the product water.


In nature, osmosis pushes a liquid with a low concentration of dissolved solids (usually water) through a semi-permeable membrane into a solution of higher dissolved solids concentration. It continues until the osmotic pressures of both liquids have equalized. The natural osmosis process, therefore, works great in pushing the more concentrated tree sap up to the tallest leaves of an oak tree, but it uses up pure water to do it. This process is great in theory, but it does not work properly in liquid purification process for drinking water. For this to work for drinking water, the osmosis process needs to be reversed to produce high quality results. Now there are many options for products that offer reverse osmosis filtration. These products produce high quality water for safe consumption and better taste.


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better water. pure and simple.