Porvair Sciences Ultravap Levante automation-ready blowdown evaporator

The Ultravap Levante from Porvair Sciences is a nitrogen blowdown evaporator that comes with an RS232 connection and a remote command set, enabling it to connect to and be operated from most robotic liquid handling systems. The automation-ready microplate evaporator is suitable for laboratories that may wish to automate their sample dry-down bottleneck in the future.

The product includes full-colour touchscreen graphic displays, an integrated auto-ranging power supply and built-in solvent fume venting. Combined with real-time run displays showing actual gas temperature, gas flow rate and stage height, it puts user in full control of their evaporation protocols. Offering multistep ramped programming with full alphanumeric program naming, the unit offers the capability to automatically handle even complex evaporation protocols effortlessly.

Designed around a standard ANSI/SLAS plate ‘nest’ to accept most microplate formats and tube racks, the evaporator can accommodate tubes up to 80 mm in height in a variety of configurations to allow the use of 2-dram vials, 1.5 mL HPLC vials, barcoded tubes in racks and many other common formats. Evaporator heads are made to match these formats in 24-, 48-, 96- and 384-well configurations. The company’s 96-well spiral needle head, which creates a vortex in certain plates to speed up evaporation, can also be used.

The product can be operated from an in-house supply of nitrogen/clean dry air or from a gas cylinder. The blowdown technique employed by the device has been adopted by labs worldwide for removing chromatography solvents such as dichloromethane, acetonitrile methanol and hexane.