Reverse Osmosis

Reverse osmosis separation technology is used to remove dissolved impurities from water through the use of a semi-permeable membrane. RO technology involves the reversal of flow through a membrane from a high salinity, or concentrated solution to the high purity, or "permeate", stream on the opposite side of the membrane. Pressure is used as the driving force for the separation. The applied pressure (P) must be in excess of the osmotic pressure of the dissolved contaminants to allow flow across the membrane.
Spiral wound RO membrane elements operate installed in pressure vessels. A pressure vessel usually contains from one to six elements connected in series. An RO system can be configured to have a single pressure vessel (small systems) or a number of pressure vessels connected in parallel (array) or in series (stage).
In a parallel array, all pressure vessels receive a similar flow of feed water and operate at the same recovery rate. The recovery rate depends on the number of membranes inside the pressure vessel. Each membrane is limited to a maximum 10 percent recovery. Therefore a pressure vessel containing 6 membranes should not exceed 60% recovery. In order to design RO system to operate at higher recovery rate, the waste water from an array (approximately 50% of the initial feed flow) is fed to another array, in series.
Reverse osmosis (RO), also known as hyper filtration, is used by our Commercial & Industrial Brackish Water & Seawater Reverse Osmosis Systems to purify water by removing salts and other impurities. It is also capable of rejecting bacteria, sugars, proteins, particles, dyes, and other constituents that have a molecular weight of greater than 150-250 Daltons.