Question

What is relevance of refining petroleum hydrocarbons by distillation?

Answer 1

Petroleum hydrocarbon or crude oil is a rich source of hydrocarbons of great importance.These hydrocarbon chain are of different in length.Many useful products can be made with the help of these hydrocarbons if they will be separated from one another.

So The basic need of separation of hydrocarbon forced the human to develop a process called fractional distillation in which all the components like fuel oil , lubricating oil , diesel , kerosene , naphtha from the petroleum gets separated.

The process is based on the principle of passing the steam of petroleum at 350⁰ C from the lower end of the fractional distillation coloumn and different hydrocarbons of different boiling point condenses at there repective boiling temperature (when the main steam achieve that temperature) and get collected over a horizontal tray and separated out.Obviuosly shorter chain hydrocarbons have low boiling point so they will codense at last when temperature of the steam drops down to that temperature(at higher region of distillation coloumn) , where as hydrocarbons of bigger chain will condense first at the lower regions.

There are so much uses of those hydrocarbons extracted in distillation.here are some of importances.

1) petroleum gas-cooking , heating ,plastic making.

2) Gasoline- Motor fuel

3) kerosene - fuel for jet engines.

4)lubricating oil - used for motor oil , grease and other lubricants.

5)Naphtha - It is made into petrol for cars.