Translations:Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Health and Science/Chemistry/36/en

n. Distillation

Distillation, which is heating the liquid to boiling and collecting the condensed vapors, is a useful technique to separate components based on different boiling points. Distillation separates two volatile liquids where the more volatile component is more pure. The farther apart the boiling temperatures, the more likely that the distillation will be successful. The lower the boiling point, the more volatile the compound is and therefore the faster it will vaporize. Success also depends on the interactions between particles, since two dissimilar liquids that are dissolved in each other are likely to form azeotropes. If this occurs, the liquid and gas phase will both have the same composition and therefore boiling will not cause further separation.