I’m in US-GA and I cannot find denatured alcohol locally. WTF happened? I need something 100% alcohol for cleaning electronics.
You can not really have 100% alcohol. It’s really hard to get the last few percent of water out of it. Destillation is useless at that percentage and drying agents are used, but even they can’t get all water out. Denatured just means that there is a bitter tasting chemical mixed in so it won’t be drunken by those wanting to avoid alcohol taxes.
That’s mostly correct but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. Distillation is useless at the azeotropic point but ternary mixtures are used to break the azeotrope. Once you move past the azeotrope you can continue distillation to high purity. You could also do pressure swing distillation but my guess (even though I’m not exactly a chemical engineer doing unit operations for a living) is that it wouldn’t be economical. Of course, getting “100%” pure anything is really a different story…