Porvair Sciences has launched its new generation Ultravap Levante nitrogen blowdown sample evaporator.
Nasreen Osman
The second generation system offers the many benefits associated with Porvair's flagship evaporator, the Ultravap Mistral, in an affordable, easy-to-use package.
The single microplate evaporator is designed to meet the current needs of most chromatography laboratories whilst providing the future option of fully automating sample dry-down in applications such as LC/MS analysis, dry recovery or reconstitution.
The compact, standalone Ultravap Levante is fully programmable and easy to control from a robot liquid handler. Its advanced head technology enables delivery of evaporation temperatures up to 80°C for faster solvent evaporation rates. If required the system has the option to be fitted with ducted fan fume extraction.
Operated via an intuitive graphical colour LED touchscreen, software features includes up to 5 stored alphanumerically named programmes and multi-step evaporation programmes. This functionality combined with real-time run displays showing actual gas temperature, gas flow rate and stage height means the Ultravap Levante puts you in full control of the evaporation process. A removable acrylic splash guard safeguards the operator and also ensures efficient removal of the solvent vapour from the evaporation table.
The Ultravap Levante is supplied with an evaporator head of your choice, which may be interchanged quickly and easily with a head of a different pattern as your workflow demands. The precision engineered mechanism uses a standard ANSI/SLAS plate nest to accept most microplate formats and tube racks. It can accommodate tubes up to 50mm in height in a variety of configurations to allow the use of 2 Dram vials, 1.5ml HPLC vials, bar-coded tubes in racks and many other common formats. Evaporator heads are available for efficient dry down of 24-, 48-, 96- and 384-well microplates at temperatures up to 80°C
The Ultravap Levante can be operated from both a gas cylinder and an in-house supply of nitrogen or clean dry air. The blow-down evaporation technique is well proven for efficiently removing chromatography solvents such as dichloromethane, acetonitrile, methanol and hexane.