Opportunities for process intensification using reverse micelles in liquidand supercritical carbon dioxide

Liquid and supercritical carbon dioxide can be used as a replacer for organ ic solvents, which potentially enables the development of clean processes. A general disadvantage of CO2, however, is that it is a very poor solvent f or high molecular weight or hydrophilic molecules. By using reverse micelle s to overcome this problem, a wide variety of novel processes can be though t of. In this review, it is shown that the use of micellar systems in super critical CO2 leads to processes generating a minimum amount of waste and wi th a low energy requirement. It is also shown that especially downstream pr ocessing of biochemicals and polymerization reactions can benefit From this technique, as the number of consecutive process steps can be reduced signi ficantly. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.