Dear all, Jaywant Pawar asked a simple but triky question. He wanted to recover/separate methanol, acetone, dichloromethane and isopropyl alcohol from a mixture. Based on the boiling point of the single components 64.7, 56, 39.6 and 82.6 °C I suggested to try distillation. The point is -as Michael Pach correctly pointed out - that the components of this mixture do forms azeotropes. So if you want to be helpful to Jaywant Pawar, stop to insist about distillation or fractionate distillation and focus on the real problem: azeotrope formation. I can think many possible complicate alternatives for this task, but they are not worth the cost of the mixture.

You should be able to distill your mixture

You will have to do fractional distillation of the mixture. Simple distillation is possible if difference between boiling points at leat 25 degree celsius. 

Yes i agree with kalhapure that you can separate by fractional distillation.  

It depends on the composition of the solvent mixture. If they don't react with each other on heating or do not form any azeotropes then separation by fractional distillation (using  a long fractional column)  possible. Also the solvents should have considerable difference of boiling points.

This page gives the boiling point of various organic solvents.

https://www.organicdivision.org/orig/organic_solvents.html

Depending on what is the composition of the solvent mixture you can separate them by fractional distillation. Dichloromethane 39.8, Acetone 56.2, methanol 64.6 and isopropanol 82.4. You need efficient cooling to recover DCM.

Dear all, Jaywant Pawar asked a simple but triky question. He wanted to recover/separate methanol, acetone, dichloromethane and isopropyl alcohol from a mixture. Based on the boiling point of the single components 64.7, 56, 39.6 and 82.6 °C I suggested to try distillation. The point is -as Michael Pach correctly pointed out - that the components of this mixture do forms azeotropes. So if you want to be helpful to Jaywant Pawar, stop to insist about distillation or fractionate distillation and focus on the real problem: azeotrope formation. I can think many possible complicate alternatives for this task, but they are not worth the cost of the mixture.

i agree with Dr kalhapure that you can separate by fractional distillation. In this case, you must be carefully to separate them from mixture.

Dear All, 

Thank you very much for your suggestions.

Dr. Massimo & Dr. Gandhi yeah, I am facing with the azeoptropes  formation issue so couldn't able to solve my issue.

Thanks once again.

You could separate them through batch loaded gas chromatography. This would be sufficient for analysis but existing engineering has severe scale limitations as machines are not built for preparative gas chromatography.

I assume you're dealing with a volume of solvent from a preparatory chromatography column.  My solution was to save and re-use the recovered solvent mixtures.  NMR quicky reveals the composition of the recovered mixture, and a bit of math tells you how to adjust to the desired ratio.  I always had bottles of recovered EtOAc/Hexane and EtOAc/DCM, in several proportions, on hand for prep work. Big columns consuming 10-50 liters of solvent made it well worth the extra effort.

If you're running multi-solvent gradients, however, you might not be able to put the recovered mixture to much use.  Perhaps distillation fractions that contain 3 of the 4 solvents would be useful.  You can also add water to the mix, which will give you different results at the top of a distillation column.  (Methanol and acetone do not azeotrope with water.)  I won't hazard a guess as to what you'll see, but it might yield a useful amount of a binary mixture at some point in the distillation.

Massimo Luigi Capobianco, I'm not a chemist; I'm an historian, so I found it interesting that you used the term "fractionate distillation." I am writing the biography of a chemical engineer who in 1921 patented a "method of fractionate distillation." Are "fractionate" distillation and "fractional" distillation exactly the same thing? Are these two terms used interchangeably?  

by slow fractional distilaltion with long column .

very slow distillation require to separate mixy=ture of solvents.