New automatic dry down station released by Porvair

Porvair Sciences has introduced a new version of its popular 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. Safety of operation is ensured as this CE-marked unit fits into all fume cupboards and boasts full integral fume management within the unit.

The new Mistral Ex is a fully robot compatible nitrogen dry down evaporator, suitable for integration adjacent to most leading laboratory liquid handling robots. Designed with the demands of linear robots very much in mind, the Mistral Ex offers 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 is able to 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.