Intro to Distillation Theory

Why Distillation?

Distillation is an ancient tool used to produce pure materials.  Historians trace its use as far back as 3500 BC, dating to the very dawn of civilization and written records.  The ancient people used distillation to produce essential oils and aromatic compounds for medicinal use.  In fact, the techniques used today don’t vary all that much from the original methods, but the equipment is probably better.

Later, it was discovered that distillation could produce alcoholic spirits, a practice that has been used for at least 1500 years.  Today, distillation is an essential tool for a huge range of industries.  Examples include food, polymers, fine chemicals, essential oils, flavors, fragrances, alternative energy sources, pharmaceuticals and many others.  If a company works with a fluid, they have probably considered distillation as a purification technique at some point. 

So, what is distillation?

Distillation purifies a liquid mixture by taking advantage of the differences in the boiling points of the components of the liquid mixture.

Basically, if you have a binary mixture, and the two materials have a very large difference in their boiling points, it is very easy to separate them by heating the mixture to the boiling point and collecting distillate.  The lower boiling material will move into the gas phase (vaporization), while the higher boiling material will be left behind. 

This is post 1 in a series of posts to teach basic distillation theory.