Summary Of Distillation In Organic Chemistry

Introduction

In organic chemistry, there are three different techniques that can be used to purify a crude product. These techniques are distillation, recrystallization, and column chromatography. Distillation process is an old technique used to separate two or more volatile mixture, and it is used for liquid mixture, recrystallization can only be used to separate solid mixture, and the column chromatography technique can be used to separate both solid and liquid mixtures. Distillation is the process of separating the unknown component from the liquid by evaporation, condensation, and condensate collection. Distillation technique can be used to purify two liquids mixture with two different boiling points. There are three types of distillation; a simple distillation, a fractional distillation, and a simple vacuum distillation. During this lab, Fractional Distillation technique was used to purify the unknowns. A fractional distillation is used when two compounds have boiling point differences less than 75 ℃. Hence. A fractional distillation is a better technique when isolating mixtures with smaller differences in boiling points, but it take longer and uses more energy. The purpose of this experiment was to practice a distillation technique which can be used to purify an unknown mixture. Distillation has the advantage of finding the differences in boiling points and can effectively isolate one compound from the other. During the distillation process, the liquid heats to a