Microplate Evaporator

Microplate Evaporators

Porvair evaporators are designed to remove the traditional laboratory ‘bottleneck’ of solvent evaporation from microplates prior to analysis or reconstitution in storage buffer. These evaporators give significant throughput advantages to laboratories looking to optimise microplate sample preparation productivity. Faster than centrifugal evaporation, significant increases in sample throughput are achieved through advanced evaporator head technology and an innovative manifold design, which directly injects heated nitrogen into each individual well of the microplate simultaneously. The evaporators have been designed to be simple to install, operate and maintain. Installation requires only connection to a gas supply or cylinder and mains electricity. Safety of operation is ensured as the CE marked compact units fit into all fume cupboards. Not suitable for high boiling solvents such as DMSO and water. Both MiniVap and UltraVap may be operated with a supply of clean, dry compressed air in place of nitrogen, if the chemistry allows. An in-line gas filter must be used in this case.

MiniVap™

The MiniVap is purpose designed for low usage research and development departments where low numbers of individual plates or vials need drying. The MiniVap is simple to operate and maintain. Installation requires only connection to a gas supply and standard mains socket. With manual control of the needle depth, gas temperature and flow rate, it allows fine control and quicker drying times than other standard methods.

Porvair Sciences announces new versions of its MiniVap and UltraVap blowdown evaporators that use warm air or nitrogen to speed up the evaporation of common HPLC solvents such as dichloromethane, methanol and acetonitrile from sample vials, significantly improving throughput and removing this common laboratory bottleneck.

Combining a new 48-well needle head with a dedicated HPLC vial holder that accepts 48 standard 1.5ml vials* transforms any MiniVap or UltraVap system into a high throughput HPLC sample evaporator. Applications that will benefit from the new HPLC sample evaporators include pre-concentration prior to injection (to increase sensitivity) as well as evaporation to dryness of post-column fractions for recovery of compounds.

● Quicker dry down times than standard methods such as vacuum oven

● Tests have shown that the MiniVap can evaporate 500μl of methanol in less than 6 minutes

● Designed for any SBS/ANSI 96 well plate

● 24 vial head now available

● Simple to install and operate

● Easy adjustments of temperature, gas flow rates and needle depth into the wells

● Compact footprint – fits all standard fume cupboards

Ultravap™

Whereas the MiniVap™ is a fully manual system, the Ultravap™ is a digitally controlled programmable evaporator. It can be used as a stand alone unit or driven by a computer, often connected to a robotic liquid handler. After empirical data for dry down has been produced, this can be entered into the memory of the Ultravap for future recall and use. Each programme has three stages, with control of gas temperature, pressure and plate height at each stage. Nine different methods can be permanently stored in memory. The Ultravap will then evaporate plate contents quickly, by keeping the heated gas needles close to the liquid surface at all times in the concentration process, without further manual intervention.

● Designed for heat sensitive and thermally labile samples

● Nine different drying programmes can be retained in the memory

● Ability to upload and download methods

● Robotic plate stage automatically moves plates up and down

● RS232 allows remote control via PC or LH robot

● Removes most stubborn solvents in just minutes

● Can evaporate 500μl methanol in 5 minutes

● Compact footprint allows the Ultravap to fit into all standard fume cupboards

● Choice of straight, curved & 24, 96 or 384 needles

● Compatible with Tecan™, Hamilton™ and Beckman™ robotic liquid handlers