A professional who controls batch stills or continuous stills and auxiliary equipment from instrumented control board or other control station to separate and condense liquids having close volatilization points, maintaining process control according to instrument readings, test results, and knowledge of equipment and procedure. Respnsibilities include:

• Reads charge sheet to determine types and quantities of materials to be distilled, specified sequence of operations, and control settings for attainment of prescribed fractionation.
• Starts pumps and turns valves to admit volatile liquids into still.
• Observes pressure and temperature gauges and moves controls to specified settings to attain volatilization rate consistent with efficient and safe operation, according to knowledge of process and equipment.
• Moves controls to maintain specified operating equilibrium in condensers and still auxiliaries, and to set reflux rate for recycling maximum portion of distillate through equipment consistent with efficient operation.
• Draws sample of product for laboratory analysis, or performs standard refractometric, boiling-range, colorimetric, titration, or specific quantity analyses to determine effectiveness of distillation.
• Turns valves and starts pumps to route distilled fractions to receiving tanks according to correlation of data from laboratory tests or observation of product color.
• Records data computed from instrument readings and test results, such as weight of product and yield.
• May direct activities of other workers who assist in operation of stills and auxiliary equipment.
• May be designated according to distilled product as Alcohol-Still Operator.
• May be designated according to type of still operated as Batch-Still Operator II; Continuous-Still Operator.