APPLICATION OF SUPERCRITICAL FLUID

Supercritical fluid are flexible tools for processing materials, it have been applied to
mass-transfer process, reactive system, phase-transition processes, and nanostructured
materials. It has capacity to control over solubility, excellent transportability, can dissolve
substances, and permits to formulate new reaction process for hydrolysis or partial oxidation.
In food processing, supercritical fluid dissolving power is a safe solvent it removes
unnecessary components like removal of unchanged monomers from polymers in purification
of polymers, carbon dioxide is the most common supercritical fluid use in food in industry,
because of its non-toxicity and low temperature, it is used to extract thermally labile food
components and the product is not contaminated with residual solvent then the extraction by
supercritical fluids carbon dioxide keeps the aroma of the product. Some other advantage is it
just not replace but also extracts oil that lower in iron and free fatty acid to have lighter food.
There are structured products and high-functional, high quality materials that are
impossible to produce with conventional method, but using supercritical fluid it could be done.
Example of these are fine-graining, thin-filming, fiber-refining using rapid expansion of the
supercritical solutions method in the manufacture of whisker-shaped fine particles, fine-
graining or thin-filming by the gas anti-solvent method as for the strengthening of silica-aerogel
surface coating.
In pharmaceutical application, carbon dioxide has several applications like extracting
vitamin E from soybean oil and purification of method for vitamin E. Using vacuum distillation,
which usually results in the thermal degradation of the product, solubility and recrystallization
of various drugs has been demonstrated in supercritical fluids.
Regarding environmental application, hazardous chemical like hexane was replaced by
supercritical fluids. Instead using Activated carbon regeneration and soil remediation it was
proposed to use supercritical fluid extraction. Majority of organic can be removed from
contaminated soil. High polar compound was extracted by using carbon dioxide. Chelating
moieties that dissolve into carbon dioxide have been developed for the extraction of heavy
metals from soil.

Dixon, D. J. and Johnston, K.P., "Supercritical Fluids," In Encyclopedia of Separation
Technology;http://www.kobelco.co.jp/eneka/p14/sfe01.htm