 In this video, we will show you how to perform a distillation and how to build a distillation setup. For a distillation, you will need the following bits of glassware and equipment. To start off with, you will need a big flask to have your starting material or your mixture to hold your mixture. That can either be a round-bottom flask or it could be the hard-shaped flask with the attached vigro to it that's also available in our glass cabinets. The vigro is used to distill compounds that are very close in boiling point from each other. What you can also see is that the vigro is attached to a distillation head. If you are not using the vigro, you can use a separate distillation head, and that is useful if you are using the round-bottom flask to distill. This vigro, the distillation head, is then attached to a straight cooler, so not a bulb cooler, but a straight cooler. And a straight cooler, of course, has to be attached to the water in your fumes. Then from the straight cooler, we are condensing our liquid that we are distilling, and we have to get that into our flask and that you can be doing with two ways. You can either use the vacuum adapter where you can attach vacuum here and your collection flask here, or if you are using a large amount in vacuum, you can use the multi-joint, which has three attachments for flasks, a vacuum adapter and the connection to the cooler. And you will need to collect your product in flasks if you just have the normal vacuum adapter. You only need one flask, but if you have the multi-joint adapter, you will need multiple flasks to be attached to all of the joints. In distillation, it is crucial to know which temperature you are having when you are distilling over the liquid. So you can either attach a thermometer with a thermometer holder on top of the distillation setup, or when using a high vacuum, you want a thermometer with in-built connection to use. You will need to have your flask stirring using a stirring egg if you are using a round-button flask. But in the hard-shaped flask, you can't use a stirring egg, so then we use boiling chips that are available on each lab, and there are small stones that will cause the boiling to happen faster in your flask. This whole setup will have to be connected to your fume using the clamps available in the lab, and there's a lot of joints in this setup, so it's useful to have quite a lot of small clamps to clamp them together. When using a vacuum distillation, you will want to grease all your joints in this setup. For more information about greasing joints, watch our other video. And of course, you will need to heat the left side of the flask reaction using a heating mantle or an oil bath, and you can cool the right-hand side with an ice bath, but both sides will need to be supported with the lab jack. Now we'll continue to show you how this looks in a fume. As you can see here, we built our setup, and we'll talk you through the setup. So we have our heating mantle on the lab jack, and in the heating mantle, we have our reaction mixture stirring. So this is our mixture that we wanted to still. Then the distillation head, straight cooler, multi-joint, and test-to-molts joint, a couple of flasks. Because there are no clamps in the fume here, we clamp them with small clamps so that they will not disconnect from our multi-joint. Same for the multi-joint, the cooler, and the thermometer. Here we have a thermometer which will tell us the temperature of any gas passing through here on the same level as our distillation head. You also see that we clamped our fume, our setup to the fume mood near the flask, which is generally the position that you always clamp, and we placed one more clamp near the cooler. But when doing this, there's always the chance of introducing stress in the glass, and the glass is very fragile, so if there's too much stress on your glass, it will break. Always adjust your clamp, not the glassware. And our cooler is attached in a volume order, so this is our inlet, and this is our outlet, because warm water will go up and then flow out of our system, and cold water will remain in our cooler. So before we start the distillation, we will turn on the cooling, and then we will set our heating mantle to the temperature of our first fraction that we wanted to distill over. And just like when we're doing a recosalization or any reaction in the reflux setup, you just need this steady flow, but it doesn't have to be a fast flow. As long as it's flowing through your cooler, it's okay. And then we just have to turn on our heating mantle. So we set it to the temperature above our first fraction, so 50 degrees in this case. Turn on the heating, and now we have to wait until we'll see condensation in our distillation head, and we can read what temperature our liquid has or our gas phase has on our thermometer. After you've been heating for a while, you should see vapors either in the distillation head or droplets forming on your thermometer. At some point, vapors should go into our cooler, and then on the other side of your cooler, you should see liquid forming in the cooler, and hopefully at some point droplets falling into your flask. So now we have collected a couple of droplets of our liquid in the small flask, and we collect a couple of droplets in this first flask first because there might be some lower boiling compounds in here which we do not want in our product, and then we'll collect them in this flask first. And now that we have some droplets here, we will end the temperature at thermometer stable. We will switch to the big flask to collect our main fraction of pure product. As you can see, there's a bit of liquid in here, and now we're collecting droplets in this flask. And we'll keep a close eye watch on the thermometer. If there is a change in temperature, we will switch to the last flask because that means that the compound coming over is not the one that we want. As you can see, our temperature actually lowered now because no of the compound is boiling over. As well as at our collection flask, you can see no more droplets are forming in our collection flask, but there's still liquid in our flask. So what we want to now do is rotate our multi-joint to the last collection flask and heat up our flask to collect the last bit of liquid in here that is a different solvent. It will also be that this is what we want and you can just stop now, but depending on the experiment you're doing, you will have different options. So we'll now want to get more of the liquid over, of the different liquid over, by rotating the multi-joint and heating up to a higher temperature. Make sure that you do not let any of the liquids in the other two collection flasks flow out. Before continuing, we will replace these flasks with clean flasks. So when our distillation starts, we can collect the first few droplets in a small flask, then collect the main portion in a big flask and any residual droplets at the end in the extra flask we attached at the end. When we're moving them, be careful not to let any of the liquids spill or drop back into the multi-joint. To minimize loss of heat from your glass to the air during the distillation, you can wrap your glassware in tin foil and that will reduce the heat loss you have in these parts of glassware so that the distillation will go faster. So we'll show that now and then we'll let the distillation run until we collected all our products. As you can see, we're still collecting liquids in our flask, and when we remove the minimum foil, you can see most of our liquid has evaporated and we've collected quite a large batch on the right-hand side of the distillation setup. So we'll continue on collecting most of it, but the temperature is slowly dropping now. So probably we have most of our compounds or almost everything of our compound distilled over. So we can continue with our pure liquid, analyze it if it's pure. This is how you perform a distillation.