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January 28, 2016
A vaporizing science project from Science Buddies
By Science Buddies
Can you separate the ingredients of a solution using just heat? Try this sweet activity and find out!
George Retseck
Key concepts Physics Boiling point Condensation Distillation
Introduction Do you like cooking? If you have helped in the kitchen at home or watched someone else cook, you have probably seen lots of liquids—such as water, milk and soup—heated. Did you notice that once the liquid boils, a lot of steam develops? Have you ever wondered what the steam is made of and what happens to all the substances such as sugar or salt that are dissolved in the solution you are boiling? Do they boil off, too, or do they stay behind in the solution? In this activity you will build a distillation device that allows you to sample the steam that you generate while boiling a fruit juice! How do you think it will taste?
Background What do you need to make a solution? First, you need water or a solvent and then you need a substance such as sugar or salt to dissolve, also called the solute. The solvent and solute become one solution—a homogeneous mixture—in which you cannot see the difference between them anymore. Most solutions actually contain many different substances. But what if you want to separate the individual components from a liquid solution? There is a process called distillation that allows you to do just that. It is used in many real-world applications, such as making medicine, perfumes or some food products.
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Distillation exploits the differences in the volatility of the solution's components, which means that every compound has a different boiling point and starts to vaporize (change from its liquid to gaseous state) at a different temperature. When distilling, you heat up the solution so that the component with the lowest boiling point evaporates first, leaving the other solutes behind. The vaporized component in the gaseous state can then be collected in a different container by condensation and is called distillate. This means that the vapor is cooled down so the gas becomes a liquid again. By changing the distillation temperature, you can separate many different substances according to their different volatilities. If you have a solution that includes a nonvolatile solute, however, this compound will always stay behind in the solution.
Knowing now how distillation works, what do you think will happen to the fruit juice once you heat it? Make your own distillation device and find out!
Stove (Always work with an adult helper when using the stove.)
Deep cooking pot with sloped lid (transparent lid, if you have one)
Ceramic bowl
Small ceramic plate or ceramic coffee cup
Three glasses
Apple or cranberry juice (about half a liter)
Liquid measuring cup
Broth (optional)
Cooking thermometer (optional)
Vinegar (optional)
Preparation
Make sure all of your materials are clean. (Then you will be able to sample the juice and products at the end of the activity.)
Place the small ceramic plate in the center of the cooking pot. Depending on how deep your pot is, you can also place a ceramic coffee cup in its center.
Place a ceramic bowl on top of the small plate or coffee cup.
Put your pot on the stove.
Measure out and pour one cup of the fruit juice into a glass. Have a look at its color and take a small sip to taste it. Is it very sweet? How does the color look; is it very intense? Keep the rest of the juice for comparison at the end.
Pour an extra cup of colored fruit juice in the bottom of the pot. (Your small ceramic plate or ceramic coffee cup will now be standing in the juice.)
Together with your adult helper, turn on the stove to medium heat and bring the juice to a boil. It should be a moderate rather than a rolling boil. Can you see the steam developing once your juice starts boiling?
Now place the cover on the pot, upside down, so that the tip of the sloping lid is facing toward the bowl placed inside the pot. What happens to the steam once you close the lid?
Put ice in the cover of the pot. You might have to replace the ice in the lid as it melts. If you use a transparent lid, can you see droplets forming on the inward-facing side of the lid? Where do they come from and what happens to the droplets?
Allow the juice to boil for 20 to 30 minutes, making sure some juice always remains in the bottom of the pot. Do you see any changes in the amount of juice inside the pot?
After 20 to 30 minutes, turn the burner off. Allow the pot to cool for a few minutes.
Put on oven mitts and carefully remove the cover from the pot. What do you notice about the empty bowl that you placed under the lid?
Still wearing hot mitts, lift the bowl off the small ceramic plate or coffee cup and set it down on a heat-resistant surface.
Remove the small plate or coffee cup. Looking at the remaining juice in the pot, is there more or less juice left than the amount you poured in?
After it cools, pour the remaining juice from the pot into a glass. Did the juice change during boiling? What is different?
Pour the cooled distillate (the condensed steam), which is now the liquid inside the small bowl, into a glass. How does the distillate look?
Now take the glass from the beginning with the original juice, and place it next to the remaining juice and distillate. Compare their appearances. How do they differ? Did you expect these results? Why do you think the juice changed the way it did? How much fruit juice is left compared with what you poured into the pot?
Let the liquids cool to room temperature. Because you used clean kitchen utensils and edible fruit juice in this experiment, go ahead and take a sip of each of the solutions. How do the three different liquids compare in taste? Which one is the sweetest? Which one is the least sweet? How does the condensed steam taste? Why do you think is there a difference?
Finally, recombine the distillate and the remaining fruit juice by pouring the distillate into the remaining fruit juice. Do the volumes add up to what you put in at the beginning? How do the appearance and taste of this solution compare with the original fruit juice?
Extra: Repeat this activity with a salty solution, such as broth, instead of the sweet fruit juice. Do you think the results will be similar? What happens to the salt in the broth when you are boiling it?
Extra: Try to do this experiment again with household vinegar. Vinegar is a mixture of about 4 to 6 percent acetic acid and water. Can you separate these two liquids by distillation? How does your distillate taste in this case?
Extra: You might know that the boiling temperature of pure water is 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit) at normal atmospheric pressure. Adding a solute such as sugar, salt or other compounds to water will change the boiling point of the resulting solution. Try heating up your three liquids (original juice, distillate and remaining juice) and measure their boiling points with a thermometer. Are they very different? How does the boiling point change with increasing solute concentration?
Observations and results Juices are usually very sweet. This is because fruits contain a lot of fruit sugar, called fructose. More than 80 percent of most fruits, however, consist of water, so basically the apple or cranberry juice is a mixture of water and sugar. Once you reach the boiling point of the juice, it will start to evaporate and you will see steam coming out of the pot. If you close the pot with a lid, the steam rises up to the lid, and because the lid is much colder than the steam (especially after you put the ice on top), the vapor cools down rapidly and it condenses, becoming a liquid again that you can see in the form of droplets inside the lid. These droplets fall and are collected in the bowl that you have placed in the pot. As the juice boiled, you probably noticed that the amount of water in the bowl increased whereas the amount of juice in the pot decreased. This is because the steam, which was part of the juice, was collected in a separate container. If combined, the distillate and the remaining juice should add up to a similar volume of juice that you had in the beginning.
When you compared the three different solutions at the end (original juice, distillate and remaining juice), the first thing you probably saw was that the color of the remaining juice became much darker and the distillate had no color at all and looked like pure water. And it actually is pure water; it shouldn't have had any sweetness when you tasted it whereas the remaining juice should have tasted much sweeter than the original juice. The reason for this is that sugar is a nonvolatile compound, which means that when you boil any sugary liquid, the sugar will stay behind in the solution and not be transferred into a gaseous state. The water component of the mixture, however, starts to evaporate at about 100 degrees C, resulting in a steam consisting of pure water. Salt is also a nonvolatile substance and if you repeated the activity with broth, your distillate also should have been pure water. If you compared the boiling points of all three solutions at the end, you might have noticed that you can increase water’s boiling point by adding solutes—the higher the amount of solutes, the higher its boiling point will be.
Vinegar, on the other hand—or a mixture of 4 to 6 percent acetic acid and water—is not easily separable by distillation. This is because the boiling points of water (100 degrees C) and vinegar (about 100.6 degrees C) and are too close together to result in a full separation of both components. You should have noticed that the distillate still tasted like vinegar.
More to explore Distillation , from TutorVista How Oil Refining Works , from How Stuff Works Science Activity for All Ages! , from Science Buddies
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Fractional distillation.
Experiment #8 from Chemistry with Vernier
An example of a simple distillation is the separation of a solution of salt and water into two separate pure substances. When the salt water solution is heated to boiling, water vapor from the mixture reaches the condenser and the cold water circulating around the inside tube causes condensation of water vapor into droplets of liquid water. The liquid water is then collected at the lower end of the condenser. The non-volatile salt remains in the flask.
In this experiment, the initial mixture you distill contains two volatile liquids: ethanol and water. In this distillation, both of the liquids will evaporate from the boiling solution. Ethanol and water have normal boiling temperatures of 79°C and 100°C, respectively. One objective of the experiment is to observe what happens when a liquid-liquid mixture is heated and allowed to boil over a period of time. Throughout the distillation, volumes of distillate, called fractions , will be collected. The percent composition of ethanol and water in each fraction will be determined from its density. Water has a density of 1.00 g/cm 3 (at 20°C) and ethanol has a density of 0.79 g/cm 3 (at 20°C). The fractions you collect will have densities in this range.
In this experiment, you will
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distillation , process involving the conversion of a liquid into vapour that is subsequently condensed back to liquid form. It is exemplified at its simplest when steam from a kettle becomes deposited as drops of distilled water on a cold surface . Distillation is used to separate liquids from nonvolatile solids, as in the separation of alcoholic liquors from fermented materials, or in the separation of two or more liquids having different boiling points, as in the separation of gasoline, kerosene, and lubricating oil from crude oil . Other industrial applications include the processing of such chemical products as formaldehyde and phenol and the desalination of seawater. The distillation process appears to have been utilized by the earliest experimentalists. Aristotle (384–322 bce ) mentioned that pure water is made by the evaporation of seawater. Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce ) described a primitive method of condensation in which the oil obtained by heating rosin is collected on wool placed in the upper part of an apparatus known as a still.
Most methods of distillation used by industry and in laboratory research are variations of simple distillation. This basic operation requires the use of a still or retort in which a liquid is heated, a condenser to cool the vapour, and a receiver to collect the distillate. In heating a mixture of substances, the most volatile or the lowest boiling distills first, and the others subsequently or not at all. This simple apparatus is entirely satisfactory for the purification of a liquid containing nonvolatile material and is reasonably adequate for separating liquids of widely divergent boiling points. For laboratory use, the apparatus is commonly made of glass and connected with corks, rubber bungs, or ground-glass joints. For industrial applications, larger equipment of metal or ceramic is employed.
A method called fractional distillation , or differential distillation, has been developed for certain applications, such as petroleum refining , because simple distillation is not efficient for separating liquids whose boiling points lie close to one another. In this operation the vapours from a distillation are repeatedly condensed and revaporized in an insulated vertical column. Especially important in this connection are the still heads, fractionating columns, and condensers that permit the return of some of the condensed vapour toward the still. The objective is to achieve the closest possible contact between rising vapour and descending liquid so as to allow only the most volatile material to proceed in the form of vapour to the receiver while returning the less volatile material as liquid toward the still. The purification of the more volatile component by contact between such countercurrent streams of vapour and liquid is referred to as rectification, or enrichment.
Multiple-effect distillation , often called multistage-flash evaporation, is another elaboration of simple distillation. This operation, used primarily by large commercial desalting plants, does not require heating to convert a liquid into vapour. The liquid is simply passed from a container under high atmospheric pressure to one under lower pressure. The reduced pressure causes the liquid to vaporize rapidly; the resulting vapour is then condensed into distillate.
A variation of the reduced-pressure process uses a vacuum pump to produce a very high vacuum. This method, called vacuum distillation , is sometimes employed when dealing with substances that normally boil at inconveniently high temperatures or that decompose when boiling under atmospheric pressure. Steam distillation is an alternative method of achieving distillation at temperatures lower than the normal boiling point . It is applicable when the material to be distilled is immiscible (incapable of mixing) and chemically nonreactive with water. Examples of such materials include fatty acids and soybean oils. The usual procedure is to pass steam into the liquid in the still to supply heat and cause evaporation of the liquid.
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Find a solution
In association with Nuffield Foundation
Try this practical to introduce students to aqueous solutions using simple distillation
In this experiment, students use basic apparatus to evaporate and condense the water from copper(II) sulfate solution.
This is a simple introduction to aqueous solutions. Water is the solvent and it is only water that distils off when a solution is boiled. Other coloured solutions can be used – ink was the traditional one, but few students will still use ink pens and fewer will be aware of ‘bottles of ink’.
The apparatus may be quite complicated to set up for students at an early stage in their chemical careers. It is recommended that the flasks are set up with delivery tubes for the students. The clamped apparatus should also be set up in advance for the students if there are any doubts about their ability to do this correctly.
Pupils must be standing up while practical work is being carried out.
More water can be condensed if a beaker of water is held round the collecting tube. This leads to the idea of a water condenser as a more efficient way of collecting the water – see this procedure for demonstrating how to recover pure water from a solution using a water condenser .
The experiment will take about 20 minutes.
Source: Royal Society of Chemistry
The apparatus required for evaporating and condensing water from copper(II) sulfate solution
The colourless liquid collected can be assumed to be water at this stage. The main point is that it is not blue. It may be possible to detect a darkening of the original solution, showing that it is becoming more concentrated.
This is a resource from the Practical Chemistry project , developed by the Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Practical Chemistry activities accompany Practical Physics and Practical Biology .
© Nuffield Foundation and the Royal Society of Chemistry
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Experimental study of the characteristics of hi distillation in the thermochemical iodine–sulfur cycle for hydrogen production.
2. hi x distillation experimental system and analysis method, 2.1. preparation of initial ternary mixed solution, 2.2. hi distillation equipment, 2.3. operation of the distillation column, 2.4. analysis method, 3. simulation model, 3.1. thermodynamic model, 3.2. design of hi x distillation column, 4. results and discussion, 4.1. the impact of reflux ratio on distillation, 4.2. the impact of feed temperature on distillation, 4.3. the impact of feed stage on distillation, 4.4. aspen plus simulation, 4.5. error analysis, 5. conclusions.
Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.
Click here to enlarge figure
Parameter | Design Values |
---|---|
Reflux ratio | 0.5, 0.7, 0.9, 1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8, 2 |
Feed stage | 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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Zhang, J.; Ling, B.; He, Y.; Zhu, Y.; Wang, Z. Experimental Study of the Characteristics of HI Distillation in the Thermochemical Iodine–Sulfur Cycle for Hydrogen Production. Processes 2024 , 12 , 1768. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr12081768
Zhang J, Ling B, He Y, Zhu Y, Wang Z. Experimental Study of the Characteristics of HI Distillation in the Thermochemical Iodine–Sulfur Cycle for Hydrogen Production. Processes . 2024; 12(8):1768. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr12081768
Zhang, Jinxu, Bo Ling, Yong He, Yanqun Zhu, and Zhihua Wang. 2024. "Experimental Study of the Characteristics of HI Distillation in the Thermochemical Iodine–Sulfur Cycle for Hydrogen Production" Processes 12, no. 8: 1768. https://doi.org/10.3390/pr12081768
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IMAGES
COMMENTS
Investigate the separation of water from a coloured solution using this simple distillation video, including a step-by-step method, animation and suggested alternative method Chapter titles: 00:10 Introduction to distillation; 01:07 Carrying out the experiment; 03:44 Animation; 04:10 Alternative method: Quickfit apparatus; 04:52 Testing the ...
In this experiment students will learn about the filtration process of distillation. This experiment is designed for my students to do at home with as little materials as possible. There are some much better water distilling Instructables available, such asthis one created by erbst. This instructbable is intended to be as simple as possible.
Rounded lid for the pot. Metal or glass bowl that floats inside the pot. Ice cubes. Fill the large pot partially full of the impure water. Float the collection bowl on the water. The goal is to drip water from the inverted lid into this bowl, so make sure the bowl is large enough to catch the drips. Place the pot lid upside down on the pot.
We just learned two separation techniques, so let's learn one more! Distillation separates compounds by virtue of their differing boiling points. If two liqu...
The rate of distillation is the amount of distilled water produced per hour.Constants are heat source, the amount of test liquids, the type and the size of distillation apparatus. (So all experiments must be performed with the same or identical distillation devices).
Adult supervision. Procedure. Start by adding some saltwater to your large bowl. Mix 2 tablespoons of salt per cup of water. There should be about 2 inches of saltwater in your bowl, or enough to allow the cup to float on top of it. Set your bowl in a sunny spot, either outside or near a window, where it can stay for several hours undisturbed.
By itself, salt water is harmful to humans, but using a process known as distillation, salt water can become drinkable! In this experiment you will convert salt water into fresh water using distillation, which involves boiling a salt solution so that the water of the solution is turned into water vapor or water gas.
What is a Simple Distillation Experiment? Simple distillation separates components from their liquid mixtures based on their boiling point differences. In this method, the mixture to be separated is heated and then cooled using a water condenser. The condensed vapours are then collected from the outlet of the condenser tube. In this way, different components are collected at different boiling ...
Distillation and reflux are techniques used in multiple experiments, but the similarity of set-up can lead to students confusing the two. Distillation is a separation technique that students first encounter in simple experiments such as the separation of brine into salt and water. It can also be used to remove a solvent from a reaction product ...
Extra: Try to do this experiment again with household vinegar. Vinegar is a mixture of about 4-6% acetic acid and water. Can you separate these two liquids by distillation? How does your distillate taste in this case? Extra: You might know that the boiling temperature of pure water is 100ºC (212ºF) at normal atmospheric pressure. Adding a ...
A series of experiments that includes a control is called a "controlled experiment." Experiment 1: (For question 1) Introduction: This experiment is particularly appropriate for middle school science classes or for a general or first-year course where scientific glassware is unavailable. A simple distillation is performed using a soda can ...
This video discusses how the process of distillation can be used to separate the components of a salt water solution.#mrpauller#ScienceExperiments
Specified Practical Work: SP1B - Separation of liquids by distillation, eg ethanol from water, and by paper chromatography: Developing practical skills. ... A simple experiment looking at the three phases of water is a suitable activity, and can reinforce the difference between evaporation and boiling.
EXPERIMENT 7 - Distillation - Separation of a Mixture. Purpose: a) To purify a compound by separating it from a non-volatile or less-volatile material. ... Fig. 3 - The apparatus used in simple distillation Fig. 4 - The apparatus used in fractional distillation. out in water water. out in water water. Not all mixtures of liquids obey Raoult ...
K12 White label Content : https://www.k12mojo.comFree educational content videos for K-12Watch our Educational contents - Distillation is a process of separ...
1. Pour the muddy water into the distilling flask. 2. Use the stand to hold the flask in place, supported by the tripod stand. 3. Place the burner below this. 4. Connect the pout of the distilling flask to one end of the Liebig's condenser. 5.
Pour an extra cup of colored fruit juice in the bottom of the pot. (Your small ceramic plate or ceramic coffee cup will now be standing in the juice.) Together with your adult helper, turn on the ...
The liquid water is then collected at the lower end of the condenser. The non-volatile salt remains in the flask. In this experiment, the initial mixture you distill contains two volatile liquids: ethanol and water. In this distillation, both of the liquids will evaporate from the boiling solution. Ethanol and water have normal boiling ...
distillation, process involving the conversion of a liquid into vapour that is subsequently condensed back to liquid form. It is exemplified at its simplest when steam from a kettle becomes deposited as drops of distilled water on a cold surface. Distillation is used to separate liquids from nonvolatile solids, as in the separation of alcoholic ...
The apparatus required for evaporating and condensing water from copper (II) sulfate solution. Set up a Bunsen burner on the base of a stand placed on a heat resistant mat. Place a tripod and gauze above the burner. Clamp a flask and a test tube as shown in the diagram. Collect 20 cm 3 of copper sulfate solution and place it in the flask.
Hydrogen energy, as a clean, renewable, and high-calorific energy carrier, has garnered significant attention globally. Among various hydrogen production methods, the thermochemical iodine-sulfur (I-S) cycle is considered the most promising due to its high efficiency and adaptability for large-scale industrial applications. This study focuses on the distillation characteristics of the HIx ...