What Is Water ?The most vital compound on earth..H2O. Water Covers 3/4 of the earth. The food you eat is mostly water. Your body is mostly water. Without water there would be no life on earth! |
Water Facts
Produce 1 egg - 50 gallons of water
Produce 1 gallon of milk - 100 gallons of water
Amount of water required to light a bulb for 1 hour - 90 gallons
It takes Approximately 30 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of gasoline
Human body is 85% water:
Water:
Water maintains our surrounding temperatures. In the desert, over a 24-hour period, you can experience 100 degree swings in temperature because there are no bodies of water to hold temperature at night or cool temperature during the day.
According to the World Health Organization, as many as 30,000 people die as a result of unsafe water.
Biologists have found some unusual forms of life that can survive without air under extreme pressure and temperature. But they have not discovered anything that can survive without water.
2/3 of the earth's surface is covered with water. Less that 1% is suitable for human consumption.
Osmosis
A high quality R.O. Membrane is "semi-permeable", which means that it allows water to pass through but prevents dissolved particles from passing through.
If you place a membrane between two compartments as in the container shown below, and then place salt water in one half of the container and pure water in the other half, a fundamental scientific principle comes into play.
That is, two different concentrations of liquids within the same system will try to reach equilibrium on both sides of the membranes.
Of course the only way for this to happen is for pure water to pass through the membrane to the salt water side in an attempt to dilute the salt solution. This attempt to reach equilibrium is called OSMOSIS.
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse Osmosis is the reversal of the natural flow of osmosis. In a water purification system, the goal is not to dilute the salt solution, but to seperate the pure water from the salt and other contaminants.
When the natural osmotic flow is reversed, water from the salt solution is forced through the membrane in the opposite direction by application of pressure-thus there term REVERSE OSMOSIS. Through this process we are able to produce pure water by screening out the salts and other contaminants.
What Happens To The Contaminants?
The reverse osmosis process cannot go on indefinitely without removing the contaminants. Ultimately the membrane could become clogged by salt and other impurities, requiring increasingly greater pressure to force water through the membrane. To solve this problem, the membranes are configured to split the feed water into to streams - one part to be purified and the other part to wash away the particles rejected by the membrane.
These are assembled by folding a sheet of membrane over a tube, referred to as the product tube, and trapping a screen between two halves of a membrane. The membrane is bonded to the tube and glued together along the three open edges. Another spacer screen is laid on the membrane and the whole sandwich is rolled tightly around the product tube and then bound with tape to hold it together. This method of packaging membrane provides considerably more surface area per modular than tubular. However, since the feed water must wind it's way through the path created by the spacer screen, dirt particles can easily be trapped, so a 5 micron pre-filtration is generally recommended.
Terms
Rejection Rate- Most but not all of the ions are rejected, I.E. they cannot pass through the membrane and go out with the concentrate. Rejection is expressed in percent, and is defined as follows:
Percent Rejection = (Total dissolved solids (TDS) in feed - TDS in Permeate / TDS in feed) X 100
Permeate Rate- Product flow rate from a given system in gallons per day. Another term is productivity.
Recovery (also called conversion or yield) - of the total feed water, part goes out as permeate ( or product ) and part in the concentrate.
Percent Recovery = (Gallons per Permeate / Gallons per Hour Feed Water) X 100
Pore Size- This is the size of the openings in the semi-permeable membrane. Is is expressed in Angstroms or microns.
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