Critical region dielectric behavior

The majority of SCFs also show a sharp increase in the dielectric constant (e) with increasing pressure in the compressible region (around the critical point). This behavior reflects, to some extent, the change in density. The magnitude of the increase depends on the nature of the SCF whereas the dielectric constant varies little with pressure for non-polar substances such as SCCO2, dramatic increases are observed for more polar SCFs such as water or fluoroform (Figure 4.4). " ... 

Many physical properties undergo dramatic changes in value as water is heated and pressurized from sub- to supercritical conditions, particularly in the region of the critical point where some properties such as heat capacity reach a singularity. This change in behavior means that more familiar correlations of properties measured at subcritical conditions are likely to be inaccurate when applied at supercritical conditions. There have been some experimental studies performed to measure, tabulate, and in some cases correlate values of key properties of supercritical water, such as the self-diffusion coefficient, viscosity,thermal conductivity," heat capacity at constant volume," dielectric constant," and selfdissociation constant." " Far more work has been devoted to calculation of property values from models fitted empirically to data or developed more rigorously through molecular simulation. For PVT data and its derivatives, several attempts... 

From the electrical point of view, the microwave region is of special interest, too, because it exhibits the lowest dielectric loss along the frequency scale. Therefore, and because of the high measurement accuracy, valuable insight can be gained into molecular physics. Especially, the dielectric low temperature behavior depends very critically upon the molecular structure (e.g., defects and impurities incorporated into the guest lattice), as has been shown by our measurements on various polyethylene samples treated in different ways. 

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