- Crude oil is the term for unprocessed oil , the stuff that come out of the ground, it's a mixture of many hydrocarbons that have different numbers of carbon atoms. Hydrocarbons are molecules that contain Hydrogen and Carbon and come in various lenghts and structures , from straight chains to branching chains to rings.
- To begin the separation process, the crude oil is heated to about 400 degree celcius in a furnace, causing many of the hydrocarbons to vaporize. Distillation is the physical property that we use to do the separation.
- As a molecule size goes up, the attraction between the molecules will be strong which causes a high boiling point.The Boiling point of Methane will be low compared to the Boiling point of something large with 30 C's or more.
- The refining process used to extract particular components out of "crude oil ".
The various components of crude oil have different sizes,weights and boiling temperatures; so the first step is to separate those components. They have different boiling point so they can be separeted easily by a process called fractional distillation. These are the steps:
- You heat the mixture of two or more substance ( liquid ) with different boiling point to a high temperature.
- The mixture boils, forming gases; most substance go into the vapor phasee.
- The vapor enters the bottom of the long column that is filled with trays or plates. The trays have many holes or bubble caps in them to allow the vapor to pass through.
- The vapor rises in the column.
- As the vapor rises through the trays in the column it cools.
- When a substance in the vapor reaches a height where the temperature of the column is equal to that substance's boiling poin, it will condenses to form a liquid.
- The trays collect the various liquid fractions.
- The collected liquid fractions may pass to condensers , which cool them further , and then go to a storage tanks, or they may go to another areas for further chemical processing.
