Which method is most suitable for separating a mixture of ethanol and water in a laboratory setup?
Simple distillation
Ethanol and water are miscible liquids, so they form a single uniform layer and cannot be separated by mechanical means. They can, however, be separated by distillation because their boiling points differ: ethanol boils at about 78 °C and water at 100 °C.
On heating the mixture in a distillation flask, the more volatile ethanol vaporises first. Its vapour passes into a condenser, cools back to liquid and is collected separately, while most of the water remains in the flask.
Because the two boiling points are fairly close, a fractionating column is added in practice to improve the separation (fractional distillation). Among the methods given, distillation is the only one that separates two miscible liquids by boiling point.
Filtration removes only insoluble solids from a liquid. Evaporation drives off the liquid to recover a dissolved solid, so the volatile ethanol would simply be lost. Chromatography separates small amounts of dissolved components, such as dyes, not bulk volumes of two liquids.
Hence, Simple distillation.
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