11 Facts About Superheated water

Superheated water is stable because of overpressure that raises the boiling point, or by heating it in a sealed vessel with a headspace, where the liquid water is in equilibrium with vapour at the saturated vapor pressure.

The extensive hydrogen bonded network in Superheated water tends to oppose this alignment, and the degree of alignment is measured by the relative permittivity.

Solubility of gases in Superheated water is usually thought to decrease with temperature, but this only occurs to a certain temperature, before increasing again.

Energy required to heat Superheated water is significantly lower than that needed to vaporize it, for example for steam distillationand the energy is easier to recycle using heat exchangers.

Extraction using superheated water tends to be fast because diffusion rates increase with temperature.

Therefore, extraction with superheated water can be both selective and rapid, and has been used to fractionate diesel and woodsmoke particulates.

Superheated water is being used commercially to extract starch material from marsh mallow root for skincare applicationsand to remove low levels of metals from a high-temperature resistant polymer.

Analytical purposes, superheated water can replace organic solvents in many applications, for example extraction of PAHs from soilsand can be used on a large scale to remediate contaminated soils, by either extraction alone or extraction linked to supercritical or wet oxidation.

Several different types of reaction in which Superheated water was behaving as reactant, catalyst and solvent were described by Katritzky et al.

Superheated water can be used to chemically convert organic material into fuel products.

The use of Superheated water allows the use of the flame ionisation detector, which gives mass sensitive output for nearly all organic compounds.