Question

Which of the following is an industrial application of fractional distillation?
A. Identifying poisons or drugs, detecting traces of banned additives in foodstuffs
B. An air filter trapping dirt particles entering the engine, thus protecting engine cylinders, walls, pistons and piston rings from damage.
C. Sewage treatment
D. Making of alcoholic beverages

Answer 1

Hint: As we know that fractional distillation is a process of separation of a mixture into its fractions or we can say into its component parts. It is economically very important and is also used to separate many organic compounds.

Complete Solution :
- We can see here that alcoholic beverages contain alcohol, which is basically produced by the process of fermentation of glucose. And is then collected by fractional distillation.
- In this method, the ethanol component is found to be totally separated from the alcoholic beverages. Then further, the percentage of ethanol that is present in the distillate will be calculated by using the recorded volume of ethanol.
- Finally, a comparison will be done between simple and fractional distillation processes to determine the efficiency of the two processes.
- Hence, we can conclude the correct option is(d), that is making alcoholic beverages is an industrial application of fractional distillation.
So, the correct answer is “Option D”.

Note: - We should note here that we can use the distillation process only if the boiling points of the components of the mixture are different.
- We can separate the liquid and solid mixtures that have different boiling points by distillation process.