What is reverse osmosis desalination?
” Reverse Osmosis Desalination involves removing the salt from water to make it drinkable. There are several ways to do it, and it is not a new idea at all. Sailors have been using solar evaporation to separate salt from sea water for at least several thousand years. Most of the worlds 1,500 or so desalination plants use distillation as the process, and there are also flash evaporation and electrodialysis methods. All these methods are very expensive, so historically desalination has only been used where other alternatives are also very expensive, such as desert cities. However, an exploding world demand for potable water has led to a lot of research and development in this field and a new, cheaper process has been developed that involves heating sea water and forcing it through membranes to remove the salt from the water. The process is even cheaper if the desalination plant can be located next to an electrical power plant that is already heating sea water to use for cooling the elect
Desalination is any process that separates saline water (water containing salts) into two parts – one that has a low concentration of salt (treated water or product water), and the other with a much higher concentration than the original source water, usually referred to as brine concentrate or simply as ‘concentrate.’ The reverse osmosis process is one type of desalination technology that occurs by forcing a solvent (liquid salt solution) from a region of high solute concentration through a semi-permeable membrane to a region of low solute concentration by applying a pressure to the water. Desalination processes may be used in municipal, industrial, or commercial applications. Available technologies can desalinate water from a variety of sources including: seawater, brackish, river, waste water, pure, and brine.
