ArticleScience advances2023
Water transport in reverse osmosis membranes is governed by pore flow, not a solution-diffusion mechanism.
Article in Science advances, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 208 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Membrane Separation Techniques for Plant Essential Oils: Theory, Performance Comparison, and Application-An Updated Review.Foods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Toward sustainable LDPE packaging films from cotton straw: barrier-moisture-microenvironment coupling for food preservation.Food chemistry: X · 2026Article
- Synthetic urine oversimplification results in misleading membrane fouling mechanisms in bipolar membrane electrodialysis.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Understanding and modelling ammonia partitioning and transport across reverse osmosis membrane.Nature communications · 2026Article
- In Situ Ptychographic X-ray Computed Tomography of Fully Hydrated Polyamide Membranes.Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids · 2026Article
- Overcoming the trade-off in reverse osmosis membranes through homologous matching.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Dewatering Hypersaline NaMembranes · 2025Article
- Temporal fluctuations of non-equilibrium water accessible pathways in polyamide reverse osmosis active layers.Journal of membrane science letters · 2025Article
- Spirocyclic poly(vinylene ether ketone) membranes with enhanced microporosity for energy-efficient alcohol-hydrocarbon azeotrope separation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Wearable solar fluidic system.Science advances · 2025Article
- Asymmetrical polyimide membranes with programmable polymer chain architectures for liquid hydrocarbon fractionation.Science advances · 2025Article
- Solvent Transport in Disordered and Dynamic Membrane Pores: Implications for Reverse Osmosis and Nanofiltration Membranes.Environmental science & technology · 2025Article
- A fundamental mass transport model based on molecular insights for pervaporation desalination.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Resonant osmotic diodes for voltage-induced water filtration across composite membranes.Nature materials · 2025Article
- Nodular networks in hydrated polyamide desalination membranes enhance water transport.Science advances · 2025Article
- Carboxylic Acid Concentration in Downstream Bioprocessing Using High-Pressure Reverse Osmosis.ACS sustainable chemistry & engineering · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We performed nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD) simulations and solvent permeation experiments to unravel the mechanism of water transport in reverse osmosis (RO) membranes. The NEMD simulations reveal that water transport is driven by a pressure gradient within the membranes, not by a water concentration gradient, in marked contrast to the classic solution-diffusion model. We further show that water molecules travel as clusters through a network of pores that are transiently connected. Permeation experiments with water and organic solvents using polyamide and cellulose triacetate RO membranes showed that solvent permeance depends on the membrane pore size, kinetic diameter of solvent molecules, and solvent viscosity. This observation is not consistent with the solution-diffusion model, where permeance depends on the solvent solubility. Motivated by these observations, we demonstrate that the solution-friction model, in which transport is driven by a pressure gradient, can describe water and solvent transport in RO membranes.
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