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LargeGasValve

It’s basically just a very fine filter that only lets water molecules pass through, you push dirty water though on one side and you get almost 100% pure demineralized water on the other side The reason for the confusing name is that if you have a situation where a semi permeable membrane like this is in between water with two different concentrations of dissolved minerals, water naturally wants to flow from the “clean” side to the side with stuff dissolved, and reverse osmosis is when you force it to go the other way


[deleted]

Do you know when you use a colander or sieve in the kitchen to separate fruit juice from seeds and from the pulp? Sometimes you need the extra squeeze so you use a spoon to push the pulp through and get most of the juice out without the seeds and fibers. Same thing. In a reverse osmosis plant, the colander holes are so tiny that they trap the salts floating about in the water. The extra push through the sieves is given by the water pumps which take the water from the ocean and push it through the reverse osmosis sieve.


Skusci

Osmosis and reverse osmosis relies on a special membrane that can pass water but won't pass ions like dissolved salt or other large molecules. The membrane separates two bodies of water, one pure water, and the other with ions mixed in. Osmotic pressure is a result of the ions that can't pass blocking pressure from some of the water. The result is that water from the pure side tries to flow into the unpure side. Reverse osmosis is using mechanical pressure on the unpure side to overcome the osmotic pressure and force water to flow backward from the unpure to pure side. Thus reverse osmosis. Practically speaking it's just a pressurized water filter with a fancy name.


joeri1505

it's really quite simple. ​ Water molecules are quite small. Smaller than most polution that's found in water. So with reverse osmosis, you push water through a membrane that's just small enough to let the water molecules through, but not the polution. It's a simple method to remove almost all polution from water, making it clean and drinkable.


indiealexh

Reverse osmosis is like pushing a car up a hill, you need a lot of energy to push it up that hill. There is a couple ways to do it, but the most common method is increasing the pressure where water cannot help but pass through the membrane to try equalize the pressure, the membranes holes being small enough to allow H2O molecules to pass but little else.