besides distillation are there any other methods for seperating alcohol from water?

Question

such as freezing or is the alcohol chemically bonded with the water molecules

Answer 1

I presume by alcohol you mean ethanol, which is the stuff in alcoholic beverages that people can drink. If so, there are very few ways to separate them. Freezing won't separate alcohol from water, nor almost any other two liquids that are miscible. Even distilling is difficult because ethanol and water form an azeotrope, meaning that although their boiling points are twenty degrees apart, even at the lower boiling point of ethanol some water will be boiling off as well, because they are so tightly bonded. The only other semi-practical way would be to do an extraction: add a non-polar liquid (ethyl acetate, ether, dichloromethane, hexanes, etc.) that is non-miscible with water but which ethanol will dissolve in. Even that method isn't that great, because not all the ethanol will go into that solvent, and typically some of the solvent will go into the water, especially if it's not very non-polar.

As a practicing chemist if I had a solution that had water and ethanol and I wanted only water I would evaporate everything to dryness and then add in however much water I wanted. They are very difficult to separate.

Regarding other alcohols, methanol would be even more difficult to separate, but as you get to larger alcohols the separation becomes easier. Somewhere around hexanol or so they are no longer miscible with water, and even propanol is not very miscible with water solutions of high salt content.