How to Use supercritical in a Sentence

supercritical

adjective
  • At that point, water goes supercritical and can hold five to 10 times as much energy as normal steam.
    — Brad Plumer, New York Times, 28 Aug. 2023
  • Put simply, the rock above the supercritical zone goes through a change when subjected to the temperatures and pressures at such a depth.
    — David Szondy, New Atlas, 6 Aug. 2024
  • To keep the carbon dioxide in a supercritical state, that layer needs to be at least half a mile (800 meters) deep.
    — Ramesh Agarwal, The Conversation, 2 Dec. 2025
  • Some might assume rom-coms are a supercritical artform devoid of any distinct politics.
    — Louis Staples, Harper's BAZAAR, 28 Dec. 2022
  • At these levels, water enters a supercritical phase and can carry up to five times more energy than standard hot water.
    — Aman Tripathi, Interesting Engineering, 11 Mar. 2026
  • The carbon dioxide might be transported as a supercritical gas – which is right at the phase change from liquid to gas and has the properties of both – or dissolved in a liquid.
    — Ramesh Agarwal, The Conversation, 2 Dec. 2025
  • The Carbon One project uses carbon dioxide in a supercritical state as its working fluid.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 1 June 2026
  • Similarly, when humans are sleep deprived, their brains become supercritical, although a good night’s sleep can move them back toward the critical point.
    — John M. Beggs, Quanta Magazine, 31 Jan. 2023
  • But only one project has actually found supercritical fluids.
    — Daniel Oberhaus, Wired, 13 Feb. 2020
  • In a supercritical brain, incoming signals would get lost in a frenzy of electrical activity, and the effect would be like trying to talk to a seizure victim.
    — Jennifer Ouellette, Quanta Magazine, 14 June 2018
  • That means to model a steam world, researchers have to consider how water behaves as pure steam, and in extreme states like as a supercritical fluid and as superionic ice.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 26 Aug. 2025
  • The vibrant greenery — sticks and stems included — will be macerated and put into steel vats, their essence drained with something like supercritical carbon dioxide.
    — Chris Goldstein, Philly.com, 6 July 2017
  • This is subjected to a supercritical drying process to remove the solution – and what's left behind is a silver foam that has a thousandth of the density of normal silver.
    — David Szondy, New Atlas, 15 Jan. 2025
  • In a supercritical network, the connections are so strong that almost all neurons are coupled together, which allows only one large assembly.
    — John M. Beggs, Quanta Magazine, 31 Jan. 2023
  • The efficiency of a supercritical turbine can be understood by comparing its operation to that of a steam turbine’s.
    — Aman Kumar, Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 June 2026
  • The work requires an instrument called a supercritical fluid chromatograph, or SFC for short.
    — Katherine Ellen Foley, Quartz, 15 June 2020
  • Given its proximity to its host star and the massive pressures from that much ocean, at least some of that water would be in a supercritical state, and the pressure near the rocky core would force water to form high pressure solids.
    — Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica, 30 Aug. 2023
  • The turbine also has to work at the high pressures and temperatures required for supercritical CO2.
    — Avery Thompson, Popular Mechanics, 25 May 2017
  • The deeper developers dig to reach supercritical temperatures, the more expensive the project becomes.
    — Justin Worland/reykjavik, Time, 25 July 2017
  • The Hoka Speedgoat 7 incorporates a supercritical foam for the first time in the franchise’s history.
    — Ian Servantes, Footwear News, 1 Feb. 2026
  • Like, the turbine blades, which need to be designed to work efficiently with the not quite liquid, not quite vapor consistency of supercritical CO2.
    — Nick Stockton, WIRED, 26 May 2017
  • The system uses heat pipes to move heat away from the reactor core and into a supercritical carbon dioxide power conversion system that generates electricity.
    — Aamir Khollam, Interesting Engineering, 11 June 2026
  • The now highly pure CO2 stream is then compressed, cooled, and pumped up to a supercritical 30 MPa for a return trip to the combustor.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 30 May 2018
  • The supercritical carbon dioxide decaffeination method is similar to the direct solvent method except carbon dioxide is used as the solvent in this case, Clydesdale said.
    — Ella Lee, USA TODAY, 21 Apr. 2019
  • However, as is the case with most material, Teflon behaves much differently under high pressure and when immersed in supercritical oxygen.
    — Eric Berger & Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica, 11 Apr. 2020
  • The hot exhaust enters a heat exchanger, which transfers the gas’s thermal energy to a supercritical CO2 stream that’s headed back to the combustor.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 30 May 2018
  • All the water that percolates through the crust over volcanoes can heat up (sometimes to the point of becoming a supercritical fluid) and as those fluids move, the accompanying change in pressure can fracture the rocks around the fluid.
    — Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 13 Aug. 2015
  • After the supercritical gas expands to drive a turbine generator, excess carbon dioxide created by the combustion reaction is easily bled off.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 31 Oct. 2023
  • In that case, China might increase its exports of supercritical coal power plants, a kind of coal power plant that is cleaner than the outdated models used in many emerging economies, and claim to be financing clean energy projects that way.
    — Varun Sivaram, Foreign Affairs, 20 Dec. 2016
  • Aiming for supercritical conditions is key to attaining power densities consistent with fossil fuels.
    — New Atlas, 23 Feb. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'supercritical.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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