While you may drink tap water, it is not appropriate for many laboratory tests, calibrating equipment, preparing solutions, and cleaning glassware. For lab, you want only purified water. The common purification methods will include RO or reverse osmosis, deionization and distillation.
Is There Any Difference?
Deionization and distillation are quite similar in both processes will remove the ionic impurities, but, deionised water and distilled water aren’t the same and nor they are interchangeable for a lot of lab purposes. Let us take a close look at how deionization and distillation work, their differences, when you must use each kind of water, and when it is fine to substitute the other.
Deionised water is one kind of drink that removes all ions, and has got no charge. This can be made by taking the conventional water and allowing it get exposed to the electrically charged resins, which can bind and attract salts, and remove it from the water. This method is used in microelectronics and in field of medicine. It’s the good solvent for production of different products that we have today in the market.
There are a few people who make use of deionised water in home while there are some people who are quite hesitant to buy the water filters that will produce for their family. The reason is that they do not know what is deionised water?
What Makes Deionised Water Necessary?
DI or Deionised water is the true water blank, meaning it assumes chemistry of any product is been added to it. And this has some critical implications, particularly for medical industry. When the medical product manufacturers make the product, water is always mixed in. But, to create the chemically sound product, water cannot have any impurities that can potentially change that product’s chemical composition.
For instance, if chemist wants to prepare saline and another solution that will be injected in the body, then their water has to meet certain standard named “water for injection” that begins with the deionised water. In that way, when saline formula gets added to water, it creates the exact replica of solution that they want.
If water has any kind of impurities and metal, like lead or copper, it can cause some adverse health issues for whoever injects that product.
Different Applications of DI Water
Besides medical product manufacturing, deionised water is been used in various facilities across industries, and required for various reasons. For instance, the glass manufacturer might need DI water for rinsing the product after it is complete. Using the tap water will result in the TDS deposits (magnesium, calcium, silica) on its glass surface.