Porvair Sciences has introduced a new version of its Ultravap Mistral automatic dry down station - the Mistral Ex.
With an adapted sample platform, the automation-friendly Mistral Ex is able to productively remove solvent from a wide range of sample formats including 24 to 384-well format deep and shallow well plates, vials and now test tubes up to 100mm high.
The Mistral Ex uses warm nitrogen gas blown down into the microplate wells, vials or tubes, just above the liquid level. The effect is to speed up solvent evaporation by providing more energy for evaporation. This enables equilibrium to be reached more
quickly, leading to faster sample-safe drying. Installation requires only connection to a gas supply and mains electricity. The CE-marked unit fits into all fume cupboards and features full integral fume management.
The fully robot-compatible nitrogen dry down evaporator is suitable for integration adjacent to most leading laboratory liquid handling robots. Designed with the demands of linear robots very much in mind, it features a plate shuttle which can serve and retrieve plates from the deck of Perkin Elmer, Tecan, Hamilton and Beckman liquid handlers.
Controlled via a colour touchscreen, the evaporation table on the Mistral Ex can rise under the control of a stepper motor as the drying process proceeds. This can be programmed at a suitable rate for each solvent type being evaporated. In addition, gas temperature, pressure and flow rate can all be programmed individually and stored in up to thirty multistep programmes. Each programme allows the table to rise in up to five distinct ramped phases, so that a fast initial drying period can be followed by a gentler final drying phase.
