Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Peer review/Distillation

Distillation
Striking comments carried over from the previous peer review, used for testing. This article was the Chemistry Collaboration of the Month for Nov 2006. The article has went through quite a few revisions since. From a scientific point of view, it does cover the important parts. The field is too broad for the article to be exhaustive. How about from a non-technical point of view? Tone? Style? Examples? Pictures? Please comment! --Rifleman 82 22:51, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Nominated by Rifleman 82


 * I think that some plots depicting Raoult's law would be very helpful, if not here, then certainly in the article about Raoult's law. Itub 14:19, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

.

How about this image?It assumes an idealized situation at 20 C - no deviation from Raoult's law. Data taken from http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/h2381.htm and http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/h0584.htm. If this graph is okay, I can fix the aesthetics later. --Rifleman 82 16:57, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I think the kinds of plots used in http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~rpc25/notes/chemistry/phase_equillibria/index.html are more illustrative, because they show how the total vapor pressure results from the sum of the vapor pressure of each component (each one being proportional to its mole fraction). This site also shows examples with deviations from Raoult's law, and the plots near the bottom of the page show how fractional distillation works, and why it doesn't work when azeotropes are formed. --Itub 11:27, 7 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Another topic that might be good to mention in the article is the "lever rule". I'm actually surprised to find out that there's no wikipedia article on that topic yet! --Itub 11:30, 7 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, APR t 21:47, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Automated review
The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question. *There may be an applicable infobox for this article. For example, see Template:Infobox Biography, Template:Infobox School, or Template:Infobox City.[?] (Note that there might not be an applicable infobox; remember that these suggestions are not generated manually) - not applicable Rifleman 82 08:20, 11 February 2007 (UTC) *Per Manual of Style (headings), headings generally do not start with articles ('the', 'a(n)'). For example, if there was a section called  ==The Biography== , it should be changed to  ==Biography== .[?] You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, APR t 21:33, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at Lead. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.[?]
 * Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style (numbers), there should be a non-breaking space -  between a number and the unit of measurement. For example, instead of 60 meters, use 60 meters, which when you are editing the page, should look like: 60&amp;nbsp;meters.[?]
 * Per Manual of Style (headings), headings generally should not repeat the title of the article. For example, if the article was Ferdinand Magellan, instead of using the heading  ==Magellan's journey== , use  ==Journey== .[?] done --Rifleman 82 08:20, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
 * Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “ All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
 * Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.[?]

Azeotropes
There's a large amount of information on azeotropes available through wiki now, but it's pretty fractured and could do with thought being applied to where sections should go to limit redundancy.

This information can be found under the page on azeotropes, some on purifying ethanol and the distillation page - there's probably more elsewhere as well.

Since kids should be able to use wiki, and azeotropic distillation is a specialised and tricky to understand topic, I'd suggest migrating the azeotropic content, such as that on breaking azeotropes, to the azeotrope page and then creating a reference to it on the ethanol purification, distillation and other pages mentioning it. This would help condense :) the distillation page so it doesn't look so overwhelming to younger readers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.141.19.29 (talk) 15:58, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Unit Operation
Just happened on the Distillation after discussing unit operations with some students because of the sentence: "Distillation is a unit operation, or a physical separation process, and not a chemical reaction.". This suggests that chemical reactions are not unit operations. Perhaps we can remove the "unit operation" part or change it to something like" Distillation is a unit operation that is a physical separation process." Thanks!Mschaffer (talk) 16:18, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Subboiling?
Wouldn't subboiling distillation (a technique for getting rid of metal impurities, ICP-MS appreciates that very much) be in the scope of this article? 213.171.63.227 (talk) 09:43, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmm, there seems to be a technique of "isothermal distillation", too (page 7 of 10). 213.171.63.227 (talk) 09:51, 25 March 2011 (UTC)