Solvent Evaporators - Levante

The Levante is the latest in Porvair Sciences’ popular series of nitrogen blow-down sample concentrators and evaporators. Using technology from our very successful MistralTM series of robot-ready, integration compatible evaporators we have re-designed the classic single plate evaporator to meet the needs of the modern laboratory.

Now you get full-colour touch screen graphic displays, an integrated auto-ranging power supply and built-in fume venting. Combined with real-time run displays showing actual gas temperature, gas flow rate and stage height the Levante puts you more in control of the evaporation process. Offering multi-step ramped programming with full alphanumeric program naming, the Levante is our state-of-the-art standalone evaporator.

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 80mm 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 made to match these formats in 24-, 48-, 96- and 384-well configurations. Our unique 96-well spiral needle head, which creates a vortex in certain plates to speed up evaporation, can also be used on the LevanteTM.

Designed to give you long life in the laboratory, Levante Series evaporators are robustly built with solid aluminium billet sides, steel cover plates powder-coated for solvent resistance and wide large rubber feet for bench top mounting. The Levante has a built-in fume duct and an optional fan unit is available to speed solvent vapour removal away from the plate, thus increasing the evaporation rate further. New auto-ranging 110/220V power supplies eliminate the need for a transformer and provide sufficient power to drive the heaters and motor without drawing an excessive load, thereby extending the life of your instrument.

Precision Swiss-made stepper motors are used in all our solvent evaporators to precisely control the upward movement of the stage in 0.1cm increments, ensuring that with careful programming, the evaporator head remains just above the surface of the liquid to be removed for optimum efficiency. An on-board digital flow controller allows accurate programming of real gas flow rates for the first time, ensuring reproducible results every time.

LevanteTM can be operated from both a gas cylinder and an in-house supply of nitrogen or clean dry air. The blow-down technique is very useful for removing chromatography solvents such as dichloromethane, acetonitrile, methanol and hexane. However, it is not suitable for higher boiling solvents such as DMF, DMSO and large quantities of water.

The Levante comes with an RS232 connection and a remote command set. Whilst not sporting the smart plate “shuttle” of the premium MistralTM, it is still possible to connect to and operate from a robot liquid handling station using the LevanteTM. This should appeal to the budget-conscious laboratory who may wish to automate the dry-down bottleneck in the future.

The LevanteTM 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.