Types of osmosis...in 50 words

There are some variations or types of osmosis on the basis of the direction of the movement of solvent molecules.

Reverse osmosis is a method of separation that is used to force a solvent through a semi-permeable membrane resulting in solute molecules on one side and solvent molecules on the other side.Reverse osmosis is different than the forward osmosis in that reverse osmosis utilized hydraulic pressure to force the solvent against the osmotic pressure.Forward osmosis is another variation of osmosis where the osmotic pressure gradient is used to induce the flow of water from the sample solution to separate the solutes.Forward osmosis uses a draw solution with a higher concentration of solute, which extracts the solvent molecules from the sample solution; thus, resulting in the separation of solute and solvent in the sample solution.Endosmosis is the movement of water into the cell which occurs when a cell is placed in a solution having a higher concentration of water than the cell.Exosmosis is the movement of water out of the cell which occurs when a cell is placed in a solution having a higher concentration of solute than the cell.