What Is Supercritical Fluid?

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Supercritical fluids are involved in numerous industrial processes especially food industry and have a potentially wide field of new applications. The current applications of supercritical fluid include extraction processes, reaction chemistry and polymerization, food fractionation, waste recycling, soil remediation, cleaning of electronic and optical equipment parts, impregnation, dry powder coating, aerogels, nanotechnology, and crystallization and particle formation of pharmaceuticals and many other powdered products. In food industry, the most commonly use are in rapid analysis for fat content, rapid analysis for pesticides in foods, detection of food pollutants, encapsulation of liquids for engineering solid products, removal of alcohol …show more content…

Extraction is a simple process. Several methods are found can be used to separate the solute from the supercritical fluid, which acts as the solvent. There are three basic concepts used to achieve this. First is to change the temperature or pressure so that the solvent capability of the supercritical fluid can be changed. Second is to “wash” the solute out of the supercritical fluid by using a solvent that can strip the solute from the supercritical fluid. The last method which can be used to separate the solute from supercritical fluid is to separate multiple solutes within the supercritical fluid using a packed …show more content…

In principle, the separation of caffeine from CO2 can be achieved by reducing pressure. However, this will lead to high costs for recycling the CO2. Another alternative techniques are used to separate the caffeine isobaric from the supercritical CO2. One of the techniques is to absorb caffeine onto activated carbon. The advantage of this method is that energy consumption is reduced. Another technique is absorption in water, since the equilibrium concentration of caffeine in water is much higher than in gaseous phase. An addition advantage of this method is that the extracted caffeine can be recovered and sold as an additional product. Both of these technique are currently used in commercial processes for

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