Cyclohexane Vs Fractional Distillation

Distillation is a common used process in chemistry to separate mixtures of liquids by taking advantage of the boiling points and the vapor pressures of the different components of a specific mixture. The component with the lower boiling point and higher vapor pressure is collected first in this process. Then the component with the highest boiling point and lower vapor pressure is collected last. This process is widely used in real life applications. One example of a real-life application that use Distillation is the refining of cruel oil to its main components (CIEC Promoting Science at the University of York). There is something called azeotrope, it’s a mixture that have the same concentration in liquid and vapor phases. If the mixture during distillation form an azeotrope, the concentration of the liquid and the vapor is

There are two types of Distillation, simple and fractional Distillation. Simple Distillation is used when the components of the mixture have a very different boiling point. While fractional Distillation is used when the components of a mixture are very similar within 10C. In this lab, a mixture of Cyclohexane and toluene was Distilled using simple and fractional distillations. cyclohexane has a boiling point of 81 C and Toluene has a boiling point of 111 C. since cyclohexane has a lower boiling point and higher vapor pressure, it was collected first and Toluene was collected last. There are two laws that are related to distillation. the first one is Dalton’s law of partial pressure, which states that the sum of the partial pressure of the components of a gas mixture is equal to the pressure of the gas mixture (Dalton's law,2017). The second one is Raoult’s law, it states that the partial vapor pressure of each component of an ideal mixture is equal to the vapor pressure of the pure component multiplied by its mole fraction in the mixture (Raoult's