Simple distillation

Distillation is the process of separating the component or substances from a liquid mixture by selective evaporation and condensation. Distillation may result in essentially complete separation (nearly pure components), or it may be a partial separation that increases the concentration of selected components of the mixture. In either case the process exploits differences in the volatility of the mixture's components. In industrial chemistry, distillation is a unit operation of practically universal importance, but it is a physical separation process and not a chemical reaction.

Commercially, distillation has many applications. For example:

An installation for distillation, especially of alcohol, is a distillery. The distillation equipment is a still.

Distillation is a very old method of artificial desalination.

Distillation was known in the ancient Indian subcontinent, evident from baked clay retorts and receivers found at Taxila and Charsadda in modern Pakistan, dating back to the early centuries of the Common Era. These "Gandhara stills" were only capable of producing very weak liquor, as there was no efficient means of collecting the vapors at low heat.

Evidence of distillation also comes from alchemists working in Alexandria, Roman Egypt, in the 1st century.Distilled water has been known since at least c. 200, when Alexander of Aphrodisias described the process. Work on distilling other liquids continued in early Byzantine Egypt, under Zosimus of Panopolis in the 3rd century. Distillation in China could have begun during the Eastern Han dynasty (1st–2nd centuries), but the distillation of beverages began in the Jin (12th–13th centuries) and Southern Song (10th–13th centuries) dynasties according to archaeological evidence.

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