For some reason, I have noticed the term “reverse osmosis” or the even worse “reverse osmosis filter” being thrown about quite a bit lately. This bothers me immensely. Osmosis is the movement of a liquid across a membrane from an area of low concentration to high contration. Effectively, you are diluting the concentration of a particle within a liquid. The reverse would be to separate the particle from the liquid, commonly referred to as “filtering”. Therefore, “reverse osmosis” is filtering. Unless it refers to a specific technology (in which case, feel free to chime in) it seems to be just marketing speak. “Purified by Reverse Osmosis” while sounding very 21st Century, is in fact the same process that humans have been doing for thousands of years, good old filtering.
Update – Even though it was giving this topic way too much attention, I did go ahead and look up Reverse Osmosis on Wikipedia, and it states the following:
Reverse osmosis (RO) is a separation process that uses pressure to force a solution through a membrane that retains the solute on one side and allows the pure solvent to pass to the other side. More formally, it is the process of forcing a solvent from a region of high solute concentration through a membrane to a region of low solute concentration by applying a pressure in excess of the osmotic pressure.
This seems to go to my assertion, bearing in mind that gravity is a force in excess of osmotic pressure. Therefore I feel totally justified in my indignation.
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A Note on Reverse Osmosis
For some reason, I have noticed the term “reverse osmosis” or the even worse “reverse osmosis filter” being thrown about quite a bit lately. This bothers me immensely. Osmosis is the movement of a liquid across a membrane from an area of low concentration to high contration. Effectively, you are diluting the concentration of a particle within a liquid. The reverse would be to separate the particle from the liquid, commonly referred to as “filtering”. Therefore, “reverse osmosis” is filtering. Unless it refers to a specific technology (in which case, feel free to chime in) it seems to be just marketing speak. “Purified by Reverse Osmosis” while sounding very 21st Century, is in fact the same process that humans have been doing for thousands of years, good old filtering.
Update – Even though it was giving this topic way too much attention, I did go ahead and look up Reverse Osmosis on Wikipedia, and it states the following:
This seems to go to my assertion, bearing in mind that gravity is a force in excess of osmotic pressure. Therefore I feel totally justified in my indignation.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.