Dear Virendra,

I don't know of any practiclable method to do this separation. The main problem here is that the two alcohols form an azeotropic mixture, which means that they behave like a single liquid with only one poiling point. Perhaps my suggestion is a bit naive, but I would add so much pure methanol until an ethanol content of 0.1% is reached. How about that? 😎

Good luck and best wishes, Frank Edelmann

Ethanol and methanol do not form an azeotrope. Ethanol forms an azeotrope with water (methanol does not), but they do not with each other. Distillation will probably be the easiest and least expensive way to do this. It is not an especially difficult distillation problems.

Dear Virendra,

Larry L. Baxter is right in that methanol and ethanol do not form an azeotrope. This was a typical misinformation found on the internet. It's only ethanol and water which form such an azeotropic mixture. In this point I was mistaken. Still, I think that my original suggestion (addition of pure methanol) would provide an easy way to solve this problem. For some potentially useful information about methanol-ethanol mixtures please have a look at the following iteresting article:

Study of complex properties of binary system of ethanol-methanol at extreme concentrations

This paper is freely accessble as pubic full text (please see attached pdf file).

try chem-cad or similar to see how many theoretical trays must be used for the given degree of separation, you'll be surprised of the low number (nepending on reflux ratio and reboiler duties)