ABSTRACT

Distillation is a unit operation with the objective of separation or fractionation, by vaporization, of a mixture of miscible and volatile liquids into its components. Such fractionation is made possible by taking advantage of the different vapor pressures of the components of the mixtures at certain temperatures. The distillation process is one of the more important unit operations in the chemical and petroleum industries, although it is also used in the food industries, for example, the alcohol industry, among others.