Supercritical Fluid: Green Solvent For Tomorrow

Supercritical fluids provide exciting opportunities to the scientists, as they cater to various processing needs. They can be applied in a number of fields such as drug delivery, chromatography, synthesis, purification, extraction, etc. A supercritical fluid has both the gaseous property of being able to penetrate anything, and the liquid property of being able to dissolve materials into their components.In addition, it offers the advantage of being able to change density to a great extent in a continuous manner. On this account, use of carbon dioxide or water in the form of a supercritical fluid offers a substitute for an organic solvent. The critical properties of various solvents are shown in Table 1. Figure 1 shows the region for supercritical fluids.