Atmospheric distillation of crude oil

I'm going to explain atmospheric distillation of crude oil like you are 5 years old. In simple terms, atmospheric distillation is a process used to separate the different components of crude oil by heating it up and then cooling it down. It's kind of like when you put water on the stove to make soup or spaghetti.

Let's imagine the crude oil as a big pot of soup filled with lots of different vegetables, meat, and noodles. Just like soup has different ingredients, crude oil has lots of different types of hydrocarbons - which are like the veggies, meat and noodles in the soup.

To start the process of atmospheric distillation, the big pot of crude oil is heated up to a very high temperature. Think about how hot it gets when you use the stove to cook something. The heat causes the different types of hydrocarbons in the crude oil to start evaporating, just like the water in the pot starts to boil and turn into steam.

The different types of hydrocarbons evaporate at different temperatures. So, as the temperature of the pot keeps rising, the different types of hydrocarbons start to separate from each other. It's like if we were making soup, the veggies that take longer to cook like potatoes would go in first and the ones that cook faster, like carrots, would go in later.

As these different types of hydrocarbons evaporate, they rise up through a tall column that is cooler at the top than it is at the bottom. The taller the column, the more separated the different types of hydrocarbons become. This column acts like a big filter, separating the different types of hydrocarbons based on their boiling points (the temperature at which they turn from liquid to gas) and their densities (how heavy or light they are).

Because different types of hydrocarbons have different boiling points and densities, they settle into different layers within the column. The heavy, thick hydrocarbons settle near the bottom of the column, while the lighter ones rise to the top. It's kind of like when you make a fruit salad, the heaviest fruit like apples will go to the bottom and the lightest ones like berries will go on the top.

As the different types of hydrocarbons cool down, they turn back into liquids and are collected into different tanks. These different types of hydrocarbons are then used to make things like gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and other products.

So, that's how atmospheric distillation works! It's a process where crude oil is heated up and separated into different types of hydrocarbons that are then collected and used to make a variety of products we use in our daily lives.