Ethanol distillation

3. The will evaporate and then condense on the condenser and drip into the flask.

4. Repeat the process of boiling the collected chemical until the boiling point reaches roughly 70oC, which is when ethanol boils.

Problems encountered

Many problems were encountered during the setting up stages of this experiment, because some unrequited equipment were placed together with the required equipment, which meant we had to use a trial and error method of setting the experiment up, the way we positioned some of the equipment was also a little dodgy-but this was swiftly rectified.

Another problem was knowing what the chemical was and it's purity. Initially the chemical was a yellowy colour-obviously meaning that it wasn't pure ethanol. However after distilling the chemical, removing ethanol from the impurities such as the yeast (gave a yellow colour) it had turned into a clear liquid, which could be many things ranging from water to ethanol-or even hydrochloric acid (because that is clear like the first two)!

We had conquered this problem because in theory ethanol's boiling point is roughly 70oC, if the chemical boiled at around 80oC to 100oC, it would mean its impure ethanol and should contain a liquid with a boiling point of roughly 100oC-like water. We were also able to tell that it contained ethanol because it should smell like beer-an alcoholic beverage; which is what ethanol is...an alcohol.

Distillation

Distillation is a common way of separating two chemicals in liquid form.