I understand that boiling water with salt in it, you end up with just salt. But, How does it work with two liquids? Wouldn’t they just mix and end up with the same boiling point?
In: Chemistry
Usually liquids are chemically bonded together, it’s just a mixture of the two liquids, each retaining their own boiling point. If one of the liquids has a sufficiently lower boiling point than the other, you can heat the solution to be hotter than one liquid’s boiling point, but not the other, resulting in one liquid boiling off. This process isn’t perfect and some of the other liquid does escape, which is why often you distill something multiple times until you reach the desired purity.
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