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There aren't really formal bonds being broken transitioning from liquid to gas, but I suppose it is fair to say that the supercritical state will transition more quickly to steam than a subcritical liquid with enough energy to become steam at atmospheric pressure.

The reason for that would be that there is a nucleation process in forming gas from liquid, which does take some time. Or at least more than not needing to do so.

There is some terminology you're using that bothers me, like "flash into steam" isn't really a good way to describe it. At that point you'd be better off describing it as "super pressurized steam" converting to "normal pressure steam" or something. It's just expanding, but there is no flash (which to implies a sudden change). It's gradually and continuously decreasing in density.

I think part of this may be confusion over how we overload the word "water" to mean "liquid water" as well as "water the chemical". I am meaning "water the chemical" which can be a solid, liquid, or gas. Steam is water that is a gas.

With a supercritical system, you can take liquid water, stay in the liquid state until the water becomes supercritical (where the liquid and gas phases are indistinguishable), and then move across a boundary from "liquid like" to "gas like", go back into a sub-critical state as gas, and never formally boil/flash/etc.



Thanks for the explanation.




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