Supercritical CO2 is heavy like a liquid, with weird and useful properties
Couldn&#x27;t comment to the author without paying for an account there, but as someone who has actually built sCO2 reactors -- you can get away with a much lower cost HPLC pump to pressurize the CO2 if you can force it to be a liquid at the inlet side using an eductor tube and slightly heating the tank to guarantee that the slightly cooler HPLC pump head won&#x27;t cavitate.<p>It worked pretty well, though I had to stick a TEC on the pump head. $5k instead of $100k+ for a high pressure syringe pump.<p>My application was to use the sCO2 to solubilize organometallic precursors to deposit thin films on particles in a fluidized bed, and one of the best reasons for sCO2 was that the only likely contamination would be carbon (sCO2 is sometimes used to form carbides intentionally).