 No numbers of distillations will ever result in a distillate that exceeds the azeotropic ratio.Likewise, when distilling a mixture of ethanol and water that is richer in ethanol than the azeotrope, the distillate (contrary to intuition) will be poorer in ethanol than the original but still richer than the azeotrope.Distillation is one of the primary tools that chemists and chemical engineers use to separate mixtures into their constituents.