HOME – Fractional Distillation
Some plants make it very hard to collect oil in its purest form. This happens because one or more of the plant’s chemical parts can easily evaporate when heated. When these parts disappear, the oil loses its natural quality. To solve this problem, we use a process called Fractional Distillation, where we heat the mixture carefully and collect the oil in separate parts, or “fractions.”
Here is how the process works:
We place the liquid mixture in a storage tank and heat it. As the heat rises, the oil starts to separate into different fractions. (Pic. 1)
These separated fractions then move into a fractionating column, and afterward, they travel to a condenser, where they cool down using water. The cooling turns the vapor back into liquid. (Pic. 2)
Finally, the condensed liquid goes into an extractor. Here, we collect the final product—pure, high-quality oil. (Pic. 3)
In simple words, Fractional Distillation breaks the oil into different parts so that we can collect only the purest part. This process uses lower pressure, which keeps the oil safe and prevents its delicate components from getting damaged. Most of the time, we perform Fractionation on just one type of oil. We do not need to add steam directly during this process.
