Why is the temperature graph sigmoidal in simple distillation of components with very different bps?
You must understand... in an experiment, the sigmoidal shape will never have infinite slope... This would be a discontinuity... the sigmoidal shape (rightmost) and the &quot;curve&quot; (middle image) are essentially representing identical phenomena... there is a transition from one pure component to another. The only difference is how abrupt the change is... and this is determined by the endpoints/boiling points for each component. The more abrupt the change from one to another pure component, the steeper the slope of the change. I hope this helps. I can speak to this further, if necessary.