Simple and fractional distillation of a mixture

Theory: Distillation is the conversion of a mixture of substance into vapors which is afterwards condensed to the liquid form. It cans separation or purification of substances by taking advantage of differences in volatility. The purpose of this lab is comparing the efficiency of two distillation methods with the mixture of ethanol and 1-butanol. in theory the fractional distillation should be more efficient because of the steel sponge. The sponge acted as surface area for gas to condense on. This prevented some of the 1-butanol from condensing into the vial during fraction A because it would condense onto the sponge and drip back down into the flask. The boiling point of 1-butanol is higher than the boiling point of ethanol, so the cooler surface of the sponge helped condense 1-butanol, but the ethanol still made it to the vial because of its lower boiling point. The sponge helped improve efficiency of the distillation. We will use distillation plot and gas chromatography to test it.
To draw the distillation curve graph , we counted the number of drops and temperature. The graph shows us the specific spots (large number drops) have a little change in temperature.it means that a compound has been distilled off and it shows on the horizontal line. On the vertical line of the graph shows us the temperature change with no drops, it means that the transition between the two compounds boiling points. From the two graph, the horizontal line indicate the boiling point of two compounds and vertical lines indicate the transition between the boiling point, we can see the fractional curve has a higher boiling point than sample curve and simple distillation separated the majority of the two compounds near the beginning and the end of the distilling process, fractional distillation produced much more effective.
For the chromatography, we use it for determine the purity of sample. In GC, Due to interactions between the organic compounds in the sample and the stationary