Advances with supercritical fluids [review]

In the last decade, supercritical fluids more and more have been proved as environmentally benign media for chemical and related processes. Many new processes and products have been developed, using the inherent physical and chemical properties of supercritical fluids. Moreover, these processes also promise economic effects. The prerequisites for this success however, are a sound knowledge of physico-chemical properties of – and phenomena in – supercritical mixtures and the availability of other chemical engineering data. This requires an effective exchange of knowledge between a large number of branches of science. In the following, a lot of recent papers will be cited, which should give an overview of actual results on fundamentals and their applications.