John McCoy
Organic Chemistry 221
Dr. Freise
Lab 2
2/21/13

Fractional Distillation with an Introduction to Gas Chromatography

When heating a mixture of two or more liquids, even with quite different boiling points, some of the heavier liquid will vaporize and contaminate the recovered lighter liquid. When performing a Simple distillation, you'll find that a second and even a third 'Run' of the recovered liquid each time will be necessary to improve the separation and purity of the distillate. With Fractional Distillation, the exchange between vaporizing, rising vapors and condensing, falling liquids (reflux), performs the extra separation process in a single and continuous operation. The lab was pretty long and my results still weren’t as pure as I thought they would be. Simple distillation also would’ve taken much longer for inefficient results.
The most distillate should be collected in Fraction 1 would should be Cyclohexane. Staring off with 25 ml expected collection should be about 10ml for fraction 1. Fraction 2 should have the least amount, and fraction 3 should be pure toluene with a volume more than fraction 2. My partner and I collected 10.1 ml for fraction 1, 3.9 ml for fraction 2, and 5.0ml for fraction 3.The quality of our distillation wasn’t extremely terrible but we could’ve controlled the heat of our distillation better. Based on our GC Data Fraction 1 had 87.48 percent area of cyclohexane with 12.52 percent area of toluene. Fraction 2 had 24.92