Val President TYLin Greeley and Hansen Water Solutions
How did reverse osmosis (RO) technology get started? In order to understand its history, let’s begin with a close look into osmosis. One of the most interesting and fascinating natural phenomena, osmosis is the basis for RO, today’s fastest-growing desalination technology. Natural osmosis governs how waters transfer between solutions with different concentrations. It is also the basis for the way in which human skin and organs function, and how flora and fauna maintain a water balance. The RO process attracted the attention of many scientists and engineers in the middle of the 20th century, but efforts to develop a commercial RO membrane were unsuccessful until the late 1950s. In 1959, a group of scientists at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) led by Sidney Loeb and Srinivasa Sourirajan demonstrated an RO membrane that worked. This presentation will provide information on history of RO, benefits that RO provides, applications, as well as limitations of RO technology.
