Most industrial chemists spend their days separating the components of large quantities of chemical mixtures into pure or purer forms. The processes involved, such as distillation, account for 10–15% ...

The U.S. chemical industry includes producers of industrial gases, large-volume commodity chemicals and polymers, chemical products for agricultural and medicinal uses, and performance-targeted ...

A solid sorbent that selectively binds hydrocarbons may help the petrochemical industry reduce costs and energy consumption by increasing the efficiency of—or eliminating—energy-intensive separation ...

In producing hydrocarbons for the chemical industry, refiners must first crack oil at high temperatures and then cool the mixture to liquefy the gases for separation. This energy-intensive chilling ...

Listen to the full series on BBC Sounds. Fractional distillation works because the different liquids have different boiling points. When the mixture is heated: vapours rise through a column which is ...

Industry separates crude oil, natural gas and chemical mixtures into pure products by means of fractionating distillation columns. This process is energy-intensive, but a new type of column structure ...

CORRECTION: This story was updated on Dec. 16, 2015, to correct the description of distillation and to clarify the separation difficulty posed by azeotropes. A new method for heating liquid mixtures ...