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Lab Report Miscible Liquid Water And 1-Propanol

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Introduction The lab was a distillation lab that involved 2 miscible liquids, water and 1-propanol in a 50% volume per volume mixture. These two solutions created an azeotrope where the two liquids have a constant boiling point throughout the distillation. The method used to distill the 1-propanol was fractional distillation, this involved packed fractionating columns that were attached to a distilling flask, when the hot vapour hit the cold packaging, the Liebig condenser, it was condensed. This was repeated many times so the final solution condensed was most likely pure 1-propanol. This is called refluxing, where the liquid is condensed and returned to liquid. [1]
There are many real life applications of distillation that are used everyday, …show more content…

Boiling chips were added to the 100 mL round-bottom flask. 50 mL of 1-propanol-water mixture (50% v/v) was added in the flask and heated until a drop rate of 15 to 20 drops per minute was achieved. Distilled into a 10 mL graduated cylinder, temperature and volume were recorded at 1 mL intervals. Distillation was stopped when the temperature increased to 90 degrees. …show more content…

As soon as there wasn’t enough 1-propanol the boiling point shot up to 93°C. In this case the solution of water and 1-propanol acted as ideal liquids where the lower boiling point liquid distilled first and then the higher boiling point liquid. There also was a minimum and maximum boiling point observed. This distillation method is quite efficient, this was determined by calculating the percent error for the experiment (shown in the appendix). A 5.34% error is very low, this means that 95% of what is theoretically possible to distill from this mixture was actually collected when performing the experiment. The apparatus used for the distillation involved having the thermometer in a silicone pocket. This is due to the fact that silicone improves thermal conductivity rather than just having the thermometer in the air or in the mixture of water and propanol. Silicone has a thermal conductivity of 0.1 compared to 0.58 of water [4]. The optimal drop rate was at 15-20 drops per minute, if the drop rate was lower the lab would take a long time to complete, which is very inefficient. However, a higher drop rate would increase the possibility of missing the boiling point change. Boiling chips were added to the round bottom flask, their purpose was to ensure the mixture boils smoothly so the solution doesn’t get superheated or boil

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