Supercritical fluids (SCFs) have been extensively investigated as alternative solvents for chemical reactions, due to their lower environmental impact and the possibility of tunning their properties by changing the reaction conditions.[1, 2] Using SCFs with continuous heterogeneous catalytic reactions enables facile separation of products from the catalyst and avoids the hazards normally associated with traditional liquid catalysts.[3-5] Continuous reactors can also achieve the same productivity as much larger volume batch reactors; improving safety, allowing for just-in-time manufacture and potentially reducing costs. The reaction factors such as temperature, pressure and residence time can be varied almost independently of each other in a continuous flow process allowing the optimum conditions to be more readily achieved then in the analogous batch process.[3,6-8]
展开▼