What Are the Advantages of Liquid-Liquid Extraction?
Liquid-liquid extraction offers many analytical benefits to scientists and chemists. It is used to extract a solute from another solution, often a binary one. This is completed through exposure to a second solvent that is immiscible to the solution, according to Thermopedia. In more complex cases, liquid-liquid extraction is used on solutions with many different components and separates them from one another individually.
Liquid-liquid extraction is a type of separation process that allows different compounds to be separated based on their solubilities. This involves the usage of different immiscible liquids. The liquids used in this process are usually water and a solvent. This is a common chemical process and there are several pieces of equipment that perform this task.
In addition to helping in studying certain solutions, liquid-liquid extraction also has industrial applications. This type of extraction is often used in biotechnological settings. Biologically produced chemicals and fuels, like algae, often required liquid-liquid extraction. This allows engineers to separate the different components of these fuels. Not all of the fermented and biologically formed components are usable, so they must be extracted while keeping the rest of the useful solution intact. Liquid-liquid extraction is used to lower the required energy levels for the distillation of these solutions.
