How does Reverse Osmosis Water System Work, and what is it?

The term “Reverse Osmosis” is used about a lot, but what exactly is it?

With the use of a semi-permeable membrane (a synthetic liner), pollutants and sediments like chlorine, salt, and soil can be removed from drinking water through the process of reverse osmosis. You don’t want to consume any microbes, and reverse osmosis can get rid of them along with the silt and pollutants. To the molecular level, it purifies water, leaving behind nothing but H2O.

Reverse osmosis water system diagram

When Using Reverse Osmosis, What Are the Steps Involved?

First, we’ll cover the fundamentals of osmosis before diving into the specifics of reverse osmosis. You may recall from your chemistry classes in high school that osmosis is the mechanism by which water moves from a dilute solution to a concentrated one by passing through a semi-permeable membrane. In other words, the filtered water mixes with the polluted water to balance out the amounts, which is exactly the opposite of what we want from our drinking water. It is the osmotic pressure created by this motion that is of interest.

In the process of reverse osmosis, water is pushed from a high to a low concentration of pollutants by applying a pressure greater than the osmotic pressure. This means the polluted water is being pushed in the other direction, seeking to make its way into the pure water. However, because it must first pass through a filter, the contaminants are removed and only the pure water is left behind, producing the purest drinking water imaginable.

Check out this reverse osmosis water system.

Standard reverse osmosis systems consist of four distinct filtration phases: a sediment filter, a pre-carbon block, a reverse osmosis membrane, and a post-carbon filter. To keep following filters from becoming clogged by larger particles, the sediment filter is used. To keep particles larger than a speck of flour out, the pre-carbon filter makes use of activated carbon, while also attracting and interacting with positively charged ions to keep chemical compounds like chlorine and chloramines out of the third filter. Sodium, excessive levels of lead, dissolved minerals, and fluoride are all removed from the water by the reverse osmosis membrane because they are more dense than water. Last but not least, a post-carbon filter removes any remaining residue from the water.

The advantages of RO are as follows

In contrast to carbon filtering, which can only remove particles as large as 1 micron, reverse osmosis may purge the water of up to 99.9 percent of all pollutants and sediments, or particles as small as.001 micron. In spite of the fact that the water leaving your municipal plant may have won an award for its purity, by the time it reaches your glass it may have picked up any number of contaminants along the way or may have a high total dissolved solids (TDS) content to begin with, in either case you should invest in a reverse osmosis filtration system to ensure that your water is safe to drink.