Introduction
Distillation is a procedure that has been used for many centuries as a separation technique to isolate liquids with different boiling points and vapor pressure. The idea of distillation generally involves the conversion of a solvent into a vapor then back to a solvent based on vapor pressure. The liquid with the lowest boiling point and highest vapor pressure would be collected first (Weldegirma,2017). There are various distillation methods, however the two methods utilize in this experiment are: simple and fractional using cyclohexane and Toluene.
Simple distillation is more efficient when the boiling points are more than 25℃ difference and fractional distillation is more effective in separating liquids with boiling point less …show more content…
The amount recovered for cyclohexane was 2.78 ml with a percent recovery of 79.6 % and for toluene it was even lower than cyclohexane. 2.5 ml was obtained with a 71.8 % recovery. Several errors may be considered for the fact that my percent yield was lower than 80% since my data was obtain from another lab group. These may include: Human error in measurements such as: inaccurate amount of stock solution to start with. The heat source may have not been regulated properly to ensure a proper equilibrium between the liquid and vapor phases because the temperature was rising more than 3-4℃ per …show more content…
The temperature maximum was 60 ℃ for cyclohexane before it decreased then increased again for Toluene. Toluene data was also collected from another lab group. The percent recovery for Toluene was 67.5% which is below 80%. This might be because the fractionating column was too long which hindered the process of the thermometer getting an accurate reading. Human error may also be considered again due to the measurement of the initial volumes and it could be possible that the apparatus was not set up correctly.

Conclusion
From this experiment it can be concluded that simple and fractional distillation are both effective when done correctly to isolate binary mixtures. However, my data illustrates that fractional is more effective than simple because there was 100% recovery of cyclohexane during distillation. To minimize insignificant errors and make the experiment more efficient. I would recommend repeating this experiment several times for more accurate results.
Fractional and simple distillation is also a popular method used in several industrial applications such as: the desalination of seawater and the separation of gasoline from crude oil