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.

By materials strf.ru