The presented literature of third-party authors is exhibited on this resource exclusively for educational purposes. We do not claim authorship and do not engage in commercial activities without the consent of the authors.
American scientists have demonstrated a new way of distilling alcohol & ndash; by light. It requires less energy than distillation.
Naomi Halas and her colleagues at the University of Rice was added to a mixture of water and ethyl alcohol nanoparticles of gold and silicon oxide, after which the suspension was sent to the top of the laser beam. When light falls on a nanoparticle, it absorbs photons simultaneously (and heated) and scatters them — neighboring nanoparticles absorb photons that raises and their temperature. As a result, light « caught » solution at the surface, causing the heating and pushing the most volatile component of the mixture (ethyl alcohol).
«The last ten thousand years, people heated water wrong — from the bottom. We do it from the top: the new method is more energy efficient because it does not require heating the entire volume of liquid », — notes Helas.
Optical alcohol distillation allows you to bypass the classic problem of conventional distillation: the formation of an azeotrope, which limits the maximum alcohol concentration of 95 percent.
Localized heating the mixture with nanoparticles somehow gives hydrogen bonding is a mixture of ethanol and water (which gives a high alcohol fortress). In the experiment with propyl alcohol (mixed with water it produces less hydrogen bonding) optical distillation gave the same result as the thermal.
