Modern Ways of Distillation

Distillation is a processed used in many industries for purifying liquids. In the distilling process, vapors of a liquid substance condense and partially evaporate and the remaining liquid or gas is improved because it has a concentration of the desirable elements within it, without any undesirable elements. The process is sometimes used for removing solids from the liquid by leaving them behind. It also removes the fermented waste from alcoholic beverages, leaving the consumable liquid. Sometimes it is used to separate two different end-products from an original raw product, such as separating gas and refined oil from original crude.

Oil

• Crude oil is refinery distilled into a number of products, including the gasses we use to run our automobiles and heat our homes. Crude is distilled to create naptha, which is a key ingredient in plastic, and kerosene, which is used in airplane fuel and for off-grid lighting and cooking. It is also distilled to make diesel fuel for transportation and trucking, lubricating and fuel oils, and the compound called bitumen, which is a component of highway and road surfacing material. As of 2010, fractional distillation is used in refineries to separate these components from the crude. In this process, the crude is heated at the bottom of a distillation tower; as it reaches its boiling point of about 400 degrees Celsius, its elements began to rise to their respective boiling point levels, with gas at the coolest place near the tip of the column, and other elements layering respectively to their boiling points, naptha at 110 degrees and diesel at 250, for example. Each product is then removed and containerized for sale and transport.

Alcohol

• Spirits, or hard alcohol, are distilled by one of two systems: continuous stills or pot stills. Almost all of the spirits available on an average budget are continuous distilled, whereas the high-end products such as cognac and malt scotch are pot distilled. Pot stills are fairly simple devices. They have a container where the raw mash whiskey, for example, is boiled; its liquid condenses on the top of the container where it reaches critical mass and runs through a pipe into the pot, or capture container. The purified liquid in the pot is the final spirit, which may or may not be flavored by a method such as oak-barrel aging or charcoal filtering. Continuous stills have a fermenting chamber that funnels the raw product through a vapor lock and into a boiler. The boiler is attached to a condensing column from which the final product is captured. This system allows for a constant feed of raw material into the fermenter and ongoing harvest of the end-product from the condenser.

Water

• Distilled water, one of the purest and taste-free potable water sources, comes from a straightforward evaporating process. A typical water distilling device has a heating chamber at the bottom, where untreated water is boiled, and a condensing dome at the top, where the vapor condenses and is drained into a sterile container. There are many variations of a water distiller, some quite simple and others vast and complex. Nevertheless, they all use essentially the same process, which removes salt, minerals, organic matter, metals, soil and all other particulate and potentially harmful elements.