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Lab Report

Continuous distillation is a separation process where a liquid mixture is continuously fed into the process and separated into fractions that are removed continuously. Distillation separates mixtures into components by selective boiling and condensation to produce at least two output fractions - a distillate fraction and a bottoms residue fraction. The experiment distilled ethanol from a mixture of ethanol and water using a distillation column set at 50°C with a flow rate of 60 ml/min and reflux ratio of 1. Samples were taken from the distillate every 3 minutes and refractive index measurements showed the composition changing over time. The experiment demonstrated the distillation of ethanol from a water-ethanol mixture.

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Yuvaneshwaran Srinivasan
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47 views

Lab Report

Continuous distillation is a separation process where a liquid mixture is continuously fed into the process and separated into fractions that are removed continuously. Distillation separates mixtures into components by selective boiling and condensation to produce at least two output fractions - a distillate fraction and a bottoms residue fraction. The experiment distilled ethanol from a mixture of ethanol and water using a distillation column set at 50°C with a flow rate of 60 ml/min and reflux ratio of 1. Samples were taken from the distillate every 3 minutes and refractive index measurements showed the composition changing over time. The experiment demonstrated the distillation of ethanol from a water-ethanol mixture.

Uploaded by

Yuvaneshwaran Srinivasan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Discussion

Continuous distillation, a form of distillation, is an ongoing separation in which a mixture is


continuously (without interruption) fed into the process and separated fractions are removed
continuously as output streams. Distillation is the separation or partial separation of a liquid feed
mixture into components or fractions by selective boiling (or evaporation) and condensation. The
process produces at least two output fractions. These fractions include at least
one volatile distillate fraction, which has boiled and been separately captured as a vapor
condensed to a liquid, and practically always a bottoms (or residuum) fraction, which is the least
volatile residue that has not been separately captured as a condensed vapor.

In this experiment, a mixture containing ethanol and filtered air has been used to distillate
ethanol from the filtered water. This experiment was carried out according to the given general
start-up, shutdown, and experimental procedures. The amount of mixture was used in this
experiment was 5 L which contained 20% of ethanol. In this mixture, 1 L of the mixture was
ethanol and the other 4 L was filtered water. The temperature was set at 50 ºC and the flowrate
was at 60 ml/min, the reflux ratio was fixed at 1 meanwhile the heater power at 1kw.

The experiment was carried out once completing the general start-up procedures. Once the
reboiler starts to boil, the distillation process started to occur. During the process, we have to
take sample from the top reflux drum every 3 minutes and measure its refractive index using a
digital refractometer. The experiment was carried for the next 15 minutes once the process was
complete. As the temperature at the distillate part increases, the refraction index decreased and
increased while the temperature at the reboiler increases, the refraction index decreased
significantly. The mole fraction for both distillate and reboiler was determined by using the RI vs
Mole fraction graph. Then, a graph of temperature vs time and composition of ethanol vs time
was plotted based on the obtained from the experiment.

Finally, it can be clearly seen that there were some errors taken into count in this experiment.
Such as not properly distilated, the reboiler not reaching at preferred temperature or due to some
technical errors by the unit.
Conclusion

As a conclusion, we have studied and understood on how to operate the distillation column
and on how a mixture being distillated through the column. We somehow have accomplished our
main objective of the experiment where we managed to carry out an experiment using the
column. From our understanding, we clearly know how a distillation process occurs by just
separating mixture with different boiling points. This shows how ethanol being distillated from the
ethanol-water mixture when looked through the column. We are absolutely satisfied with the
results we obtained and mark this experiment as a success.
Reference

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_distillation

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