The basis of distillation is that each compound in the mixture has a different boiling point, so substances can be extracted from the mixture by heating it to the desired heat. Two types of distillation are binary and multicomponent.
Binary distillation separates two chemicals.
An example is the distillation of ethyl alcohol from water. Multicomponent separates a mixture of two or more chemicals. The refining of petroleum is an illustration of this. Most distillation is multicomponent. This is an example of a very basic distillation column from Distillation .