Fractionating column

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a big tower filled with floors. Each floor is like a different neighborhood and different types of people live on each floor. Now, let's imagine that these people are actually different types of chemicals - some heavy chemicals, some light chemicals, and some in between.

The tower we're talking about is called a fractionating column. It's used in factories to separate different chemicals using a method called distillation.

Distillation is a way of separating chemicals by boiling them and then cooling the vapors back into liquid form. So, each neighborhood on a different floor in the tower has a different temperature. When the chemicals are heated up, they turn into gas and rise up through the column.

The higher the temperature of a neighborhood, the lighter and more volatile the chemicals are that will rise up there. That means that at the top of the column, we'll find the lightest chemicals, like methane and propane gases.

As the chemicals rise up the column, they get cooler and start to condense back into liquid form. They drop into trays or pans that catch them, and each tray has a little tap that lets the liquid drain out.

So, by the time we get to the bottom of the column, we have the heaviest chemicals - things like tar and kerosene. In this way, we can use the column to separate different types of chemicals out of a mixture by boiling them off and cooling them back down.

And that, kiddo, is how a fractionating column works!