Thread: How do you extract acetic acid from vinegar?

My chemistry teacher said that boiling is used for most separation. But the boiling point of acetic acid is 118 degrees (celsius) and water is 100 degrees (celsius). They're too close for boiling to be effective, so google says that the usual method is extractive distillation. What is that and how is it done?

That means that you boil the two liquids onto a column that has indentations towards the inside. These indentations create surfaces where the vapor can condense back to the liquid state and fall back to solution. Since one substance is higher boiling than the other, the substance with the lower bp will travel farther before condensing and the farther up the column you get, the purer the lower-bp substance gets. At the end you have a condenser which turns all of the vapor into liquid and it gets collected onto a receiver flask. You can track the point at which all the lower-bp liquid has been removed completely because the temperature of the system will start to increase due to higher purity of the higher-bp substance.

I hope that made it somehow clear. This link shows you a picture of the set-up I was just describing:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.chemistryrules.me.uk/junior/lab_fractional_distillation.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.chemistryrules.me.uk/junior/organic.htm&usg=__mXC29Sqq2-dNiDDD0Qy8rN1L7Nc=&h=388&w=354&sz=11&hl=en&start=0 &sig2=B7_2HxFtyMyhtDoHLhrcnQ&zoom=1&tbnid=OX7H5Zvn 0Rm1ZM:&tbnh=123&tbnw=112&ei=VFyoTOamDMT6lwfKoIDwD Q&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfractional%2Bdistillation%26um%3D1%26 hl%3Den%26biw%3D1298%26bih%3D537%26tbs%3Disch:1&um =1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=643&vpy=87&dur=2234&hovh=235 &hovw=214&tx=140&ty=114&oei=zFuoTIzpMoOB8gbzzeirDA &esq=20&page=1&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0