Need help with science! What is distillation?

Question

thanks!

Answer 1

Distillation is a process by which you separate 2 liquids that go into solution with one another. You can do it by boiling or freezing. As I recall, they call the freezing process distillation also, but I may be wrong.

The idea is this. The two different liquids have different boiling points, one lower, the other higher. You use this difference to separate them.

Example. Suppose you mix 50/50 water alcohol. Boil off the first 1 percent. Analyze it and you will find that is more than 50 percent alcohol. Analyze the liquid left behind and it is more than 50 percent water.

That is the essence. Now the detail goes like this. Set up 20 trays, each over the other. make the system hot at the bottom and cooler at the top. At the top you have a pipe that allows the vapor above the top tray to escape to a jog, where you cool and condense it. Pour you water alcohol mixture into this thing, and after a while you will find that the bottom tray has the highest water percent and the top tray has the highest alcohol percent, and th vapor going out at the top is higher yet. If you prefer continuous processes rather than batch processes, just make a big coil of copper tube and you gotta still.

Can do the same with freezing, the first ice to form is higher in water, leaving a liquid that is higher in alcohol.

This process is used to separate liquid air into liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen; fermented sugar water into booze and slop; petroleum mixtures into volatile stuff and less volatile stuff; etc.

If you are into physical chemistry, the alcohol has higher partial pressure - ie higher vapor pressure, thus it escapes faster than the water.

Answer 2

Distillation is the process where something liquid is heated, made into a gas then cooled back into a liquid form. The most common are water to steam to water, and the distillation of pure alcohol from a mixture. The idea is that the distilled product is much purer (and in the case of alcohol - much stronger) than the original.

Answer 3

Distillation can also be called "trapped evaporation". When water is heated in a vessel, evaporating water is off-gassed into a cooling coil, where it recondenses as pure water and flows to another flask, or container. Impurities within the originally heated water remain behind and can later be discarded. It's a way of isolating impurities using heat and condensation. This not only works on water, but on many liquid materials.

Answer 4

according to wikipedia,

Distillation is a method of separating chemical substances based on differences in their volatilities. Distillation usually forms part of a larger chemical process, and is thus referred to as a unit operation.

Commercially, distillation has a number of uses. It is used to separate crude oil into more fractions for specific uses such as transport, power generation and heating. Water is distilled to remove impurities, such as salt from sea water. Air is distilled to its components such as oxygen for medical applications and helium for party balloons. The use of distillation on fermented solutions to produce distilled beverages with a higher alcohol content is perhaps the oldest form of distillation, known since ancient times.

here are some sources 4 u..

http://orgchem.colorado.edu/hndbksupport/dist/dist.html

http://www.distillationgroup.com/distill.htm

http://www.uwlax.edu/faculty/koster/Distillation305.htm

http://lorien.ncl.ac.uk/ming/distil/distil0.htm

http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9030650/distillation

hope this is enough..

Answer 5

Distillation is aprocess where you heat a mixture of compunds to the temperature of evaporation of one of them. As that compound evaporates yuo catch the vapor in a retort tube or cendensor to change it from the gasous phase back into liquid phase (you cool the vapor). Therefore having a pure(r) liquid of just the chemical evaporated.

Answer 6

The evaporation and subsequent collection of a liquid by condensation as a means of purification: the distillation of water.
or

The extraction of the volatile components of a mixture by the condensation and collection of the vapors that are produced as the mixture is heated

Answer 7

distillation is a process in which water is heated to its heat of vaporization which causes water to evaporate thus leaving its impurities behind producing pure water.

Answer 8

here you go... picture explains a thousands word
http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/image?id=D0293100&path=a4distln.jpg