Feature

Supercritical processing

By and 2008-11-01T00:00:00

Cartoon of Baron Cagniard de la Tour's experiment

Chemists at the University of Nottingham use supercritical fluids to process polymers for drug delivery systems and for tissue engineering.

In 1822 the French physicist Baron Charles Cagniard de la Tour was looking for an answer to the question: 'What happens when you boil a liquid in a sealed environment?'. He placed liquid ethanol and a ball bearing inside a sealed gun barrel and heated. Above a certain temperature he could no longer hear the liquid sloshing inside the tube when the barrel was moved. He had discovered the 'critical point' of the substance - the temperature above which it was neither liquid nor gas, but a single phase, a 'supercritical fluid'.2 

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