Understanding the Reverse Osmosis Process

Reverse osmosis filters are a popular and efficient way to get pure water for any home or facility. To understand why this is so, you’ll first need to understand the principle behind it.

Reverse osmosis is based on the general process of osmosis. Osmosis is how nutrients pass through the circulatory system of plants or animals. This occurs when two differently concentrated salt solutions are separated by a semipermeable membrane. This membrane allows ions and small molecules to pass, but not larger molecules.

Due to their low molecular weight, water molecules can easily pass through the membrane, but salt molecules cannot. If both solutions on either side of the membrane have different levels of concentrations, then the water molecules of the more concentrated solution will move to the other side, thereby increasing water level on the other side. Osmosis will only happen if the pressure is the same on both sides.

Reverse osmosis does the opposite, mostly because it is an artificial process, applying pressure on the side with lower levels of concentration to the more concentrated side. Since reverse osmosis filters clean water at the molecular level, you can get a high level of purification than what can be done via comparable filtering systems. Moreover, because of the setup, a lot of water can be purified quickly at an affordable price.