Introduction

 Ethanol has been part of alcoholic beverages for long time, but its application has expanded much beyond that
during the 20th Century, such as being used as solvents in the perfume industry. Much of the recent interest is in
the use of ethanol as a renewable, domestically produced transportation fuel (E10).  Ethanol
produced renewably by fermentation, called bioethanol, accounts for approximately 95% of the ethanol
production. While production ethanol is considered as a sustainable energy source, by fermentation it is only
produced in the concentrations of 14%v/v and the rest of 86% is water therefore it requires further purification in
order to get pure ethanol. The most common purification technique utilized in the ethanol industry is rectification
by further distillation. Distillation is still an effective and favourable separation technique for the
bioethanol industry due to several advantages such as the high separation capacity of ethanol and the
simplicity of application. However, other alternatives techniques have been optimized for ethanol
recovery which are with more energy- and cost-efficient, such as pre vaporation, adsorption, and gas
stripping, vacuum fermentation. Thus far, the alternative methods have been successfully used for
ethanol recovery in laboratory scale but have not yet met the same acceptance in the industrial scale.
Despite that these alternative techniques are less energy consuming but the integration of these
techniques large may imply some technical problems such as maintenance requirements, high
sensitivity, and the need for qualified labour which is not really needed for distillation it utilizes the
differences of volatilities of components in a mixture. The basic principle is that by heating a mixture,
low boiling point components are concentrated in the vapour phase. By condensing this vapour,
more concentrated less volatile compounds is obtained in liquid phase.

Most common distillation techniques used for purification of alcohol are of two types- simple
distillation and fractional distillation. Simple
distillation is effective only for liquids
whose boiling points differ by more than 30 °C. On the contrary,
fractional distillation is suitable for more challenging separations,
where the boiling point difference is less than 30 °C. Fractional
distillation is more efficient than simple distillation in separation due to
a high number of theoretical plates.

In this lab, both simple and fractional distillation will be performed to

compare the results of the purification of ethanol from a fermented
sucrose solution.