The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fractionate \Frac"tion*ate\, v. t. To separate (a mixture of chemical substances) into different portions or fractions, as in the distillation of liquids.
Wiktionary
vb. 1 (context chemistry English) To separate (a mixture) into its individual constituents by exploiting differences in some chemical or physical property, such as boiling point, particle size, solubility etc. 2 (context cryptography English) To divide each plaintext symbol into several ciphertext symbols as a preliminary stage of encryption.
WordNet
v. separate into constituents or fractions containing concentrated constituents
obtain by a fractional process
Wikipedia
Usage examples of "fractionate".
Crude oil came in from the Baku fields, pumped through furnaces into the fractionating towers, where the superhot crude was separated into light, medium, and heavy fractions.
To anyone else, it would be a boringly repetitious routine of heating and cooling, checking for boiling points and melting points, fractionating and filtering.
We had taken the long route-the foreman had insisted that we see the Submicron Fractionating Assembly.
When we got as far as the Submicron Fractionating Assembly, we split up.
This includes all of the breeding batch designated Fractionated Actinomycin Nucleotide Complex Y (FANCY) series.
This includes all of the breeding batch designated Fractionated Actinomycin Nucleotide Complex Y (FANCY) series.
Aster was in her element, now, and she led us on tirelessly, down one avenue of the long, brightly lit room and up the next, past giant frosted flasks and looming, sinister centrifuges, along alcoves occupied by fractionating columns, into annexes where mechanical agitators chuttered busily in reaction vats containing somber iridescent amber fluids.
From this moment forward, he would have to think of whole man, not some easy, fractionated stereotype.
After all the causes are fractionated off, you will still have an indefinable something that makes Man a man—a questioning, seeking animal.
A good solid nugget of hard nickel-iron, torn from the fused and fractionated core of some lost protoplanet in the system's stormy origin.
It came within a highly fractionated second of getting us all killedand turning me into a soprano.
I was aware of all her hidden engines, all working away, from the slow hard kuh-dup of her heart to all the other hidden things, absorbing, nourishing, fractionating, eliminating.
Outside, the tops of fractionating towers and steel pylons, indistinct and ghostly in Titan’s feeble light, were drifting slowly into view from below.
At the other end of the fractionating column the more esoteric elements gather.