crude oil and fuels

FRACTIONAL DISTILLATION OF CRUDE OIL:

Crude oil is fromed from the buried remains of plants and animals e.g fossil fuels, over millions of years the remains turn into crude oil which can be exracted by pumping and drilling.

crude of is a mixture of carbon and hydrogen called hydrocarbons 

• a mixture consists of two or more elements or compound that arent chemicaly bonded to each other. 
• crude oil is a mixture of many different compounds. most of them are a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules 
• hydrocarbon are basically fuels sych as petrol or deisil, they are made of just cabon and hydrogen. 
• there are no chemical bonds between the different parts of the mixture, so the different hydrocarbons in the crude oil are not chemically bonded together. 
• they all keep their origional properties such as their condesing points. 
• the parts of a mixture can be serarated out by physical methods, crude oil can be split up into its separate fraction by using fractional diatillation. each fraction contains a similar number of carbon atoms to each other

crude oil is split into different groups of hydrocarbons 

the fractionating column works continuously, with heated crude oil being piped in at the bottom, the vapourised oil rises up the column/ tank and the various frations are constantly tapped off at differernt levels are tapped off at different levels where they condense. very short hydrocarbons have a low boiling point and long hydrocarbons have high boiling point. 

the different frations of crude oil have different properties and its all down to their structure

crude oil is mostly alkanes

• all the fractions of crude oil are hydrocarbons called alkanes
• alkanes are made up of chains of carrbon atoms surrounded by hydrogen atoms 
• different alkanes have chains of differenet legths 
• the first four alkanes are methane, ethane, propane…