How might you separate alcohol and water?

Answer 1

The quickest way would be distillation; alcohol boils at 70°C and water at 100°C.

You can accomplish the distillation by placing a small, empty pot inside a large pot containing the water/alcohol mixture. Cover the pot with an inverted, conical lid (so the point is downward, into the small pot). Place ice and a little water in the top side of the lid and turn on the heat.

The alcohol will boil off, come in contact with the cool lid, condense and drip off into the inner pot. Voila: you have separated the alcohol and water.

Answer 2

Alcohol is produced by yeast during the process of fermentation. The other product of fermentation is carbon dioxide, which is the gas that can make beer bottles explode or blow their tops off. The amount of alcohol in the finished liquid depends on how much sugar there was at the beginning for the yeast to convert into alcohol. In beer, the alcohol is generally 3% to 12% (6 to 24 proof) and usually about 4% to 6% (8 to 12 proof). Depending on the strain of yeast, wines top out at about 14% to 16% (28 to 32 proof), because that is the point in the fermentation process where the alcohol concentration denatures the yeast. Since the 1990s, a few alcohol-tolerant 'superyeast' strains have become commercially available, which can ferment up to 20%. [2] Very few microorganisms can live in alcoholic solutions. The main three are yeast, Brettanomyces, and Acetobacter. In what is essentially disinfection, yeast keeps multiplying as long as there is sugar to "eat", gradually increasing the alcoholic content of the solution and killing off all other microorganisms, and eventually themselves. There are "fortified" wines with a higher alcohol concentration than that because stronger alcohol has been mixed with them. As this is usually done before fermentation is complete, these products contain a much higher quantity of sugar and therefore are typically quite sweet. Stronger liquors are distilled after fermentation is complete to separate the alcoholic liquid from the remains of the grain, fruit, or whatever it was made from. The idea of distillation is that a mixture of liquids is heated, the one with the lowest boiling point will evaporate (or "boil off") first, and then the one with the next lowest boiling point, and so on. The catch is that water and alcohol form a mixture (called an azeotrope) that has a lower boiling point than either one of them, so what distills off first is that mixture that is 95% alcohol and 5% water. Thus a distilled liquor cannot be stronger than 95% (190 proof); there are other techniques for separating liquids that can produce 100% ethanol (or "absolute alcohol"), but they are used only for scientific or industrial purposes. 100% ethanol does not stay 100% for very long, because it is hygroscopic and absorbs water out of the atmosphere.

Answer 3

you can use a techique called fractional distillation. water and alcohol have different boiling points: water @ 100C and alcohol @ ~ 70C....

you can do one of two things... you can construct a bubble tower (a la the petroleum industry) and boil the entire sample into a vapour and then as the vapour cools at different temperatures collect the fractions at different temperatures in the cooling tower

- OR -

simply heat the solution to 70+ C and the alcohol will vapourize, collect the vapour in a cooling coil and collect the alcohol...at the other end

Answer 4

Distillation; the alcohol will evaporate long before the water.

Answer 5

Distillation. For ethanol, with this operation you can reach around 96% purity, because of the azeotrope ethanol water. If you need 100% ethanol then you will need to add, for example, benzene, to break the azeotrope and get 100% ethanol.

Answer 6

I agree with Mark B. Definitely fractional distillation.

Answer 7

alcohol evaporates at I think 180 degrees F. Just heat it to that temp and distill it.

Answer 8

boil it, and the water will evaporate