Advantages and Disadvantages of a Rotary Evaporator

What does a Rotary Evaporator do?

A rotary evaporator (rotovap or rotavap) refers to a kind of equipment for solvent evaporation under reduced pressure, which is composed of a vacuum system, a heated water or oil bath, a condenser and a motor that rotates the evaporation flask. As its name suggests, what is special is that the evaporation flask can rotate. It is mainly used for concentration, crystallization, drying, separation and coal recovery in the pharmaceutical, chemical and bio-pharmaceutical industries.

Advantages of a Rotary Evaporator

The rotary evaporators are essential laboratory equipment for concentration, crystallization, drying, separation and solvent recovery in pharmaceutical,chemical and bio-pharmaceutical fields and other fields. The basic working process can be described below.

The rotating flask is heated thermostatically and can rotate at a constant speed. Then the material forms a large area of thin film on the inner surface of the flask. The solvent vapor is recycled in the collecting bottle after being cooled by high-efficiency glass condenser, which greatly improves the evaporation efficiency. A rotary evaporator is especially suitable for the concentration and purification of biological products which are easy to decompose and denature at high temperature.

According to what we mentioned above, there are a great number of advantages of our rotary evaporators, as follows.

1. Higher evaporation efficiency

There are several factors contributing to higher evaporation efficiency. Firstly, the rotating flask can rotate at a constant speed, and materials can form a widespread film on the inner surface of the flask, which improves the evaporation efficiency greatly. Secondly, the high-efficiency can improve the evaporation efficiency as well. Last but not least, continuous feeding and high vacuum degree are another factors.

2. Better security

The stainless steel and aluminum alloy are widely used in the mechanical structure, and all glass parts are made of heat-resistant high borosilicate glass, which ensure a better security. Besides, the water/oil bath can be equipped with transparent covers to prevent splashing, and anti-explosion frequency changer and dynamo are available as well. All of these designs contribute to better security.

3. More convenient operation

It’s much more convenient to use a rotary evaporator, because of the electrodeless speed regulation, digital display K Type Sensor and intelligent temperature control and other designs adopted by it.

Disadvantages of a Rotary Evaporator

Although a rotary evaporator has many advantages, there are still some disadvantages as well. They are as follows:

1. A rotary evaporator can only process a single sample. However, a short path distillation can process several sample materials at the same time in one equipment.
2. In the rotary evaporator equipment, the sealed equipment has a limited life, and needs to be replaced regularly. Therefore, it will take users more time and money to replace the sealed equipment regularly.
3. The sample materials may be exposed in the air, which will cause the contamination of the sample materials and extracted materials. The contamination of sample materials will cause the impurity of extracted materials, which decreases the quality of the experiments.
4. In the rotary evaporator equipment, the glassware needs to be cleaned very often, because a rotary evaporator needs a totally clean container to guarantee the purity of materials. If there is any impurity in the glassware, the extracted materials will be not pure.

What are Functions of a Rotary Evaporator?

A rotary evaporator is an essential separation equipment, which can remove a volatile solvent from a liquid mixture through evaporation and condensation. For example, a rotary evaporator can be used to remove ethanol from the mixture of ethanol and CBD oil in order to improve the purity of CBD oil. Also, it can be used to remove water within fruit juice, in order to make the fruit juice have a higher concentration. It can be seen that a rotary evaporator has a great number of functions.

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