Jingbo Wang’s paper entitled “Partitioning of alkali metal salts and boric acid from aqueous phase into the polyamide active layers of reverse osmosis membranes” is accepted for publication in Environmental Science & Technology. We developed a benchtop method to determine solute partition coefficients into the polyamide active layers of RO membranes. The method uses a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) to measure the change in the mass of the active layer caused by the uptake of the partitioned solutes. The method was evaluated using several inorganic salts (alkali metal salts of chloride) and a weak acid of common concern in water desalination (boric acid). All partition coefficients were found to be lower than 1, in general agreement with expectations from Donnan theory. This paper can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.6b04323)
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