Sample Prep & Processing

Vortexers, or vortex mixers, gently agitate liquid samples by creating a vortex motion within the sample tube. Vortexers are composed of a drive shaft, oriented vertically, and connected to an electric motor, encased in a plastic or steel housing. The top end of the drive shaft protrudes from the housing and attaches to a micro-tube cup adapter or rack designed to accommodate microplates or multiple test tubes. Simple vortexers turn on automatically when a micro-tube, containing the sample, is pressed into the rubber cup. Advanced vortexers include analog or digital controllers with on/off switches, mixing speed controls, vortex timers, and alarms.

Laboratory homogenizers mix, blend or pulverize chemical and biological samples to form a uniform, homogenous suspension for further analysis. More specifically, homogenizers are used to lyse cellular structures, mill environmental samples, emulsify immiscible materials, and disperse chemical compounds by particle size.

Laboratory circulators and chillers precisely control the temperature of deionized water, bath fluid, or PH-neutral buffer for delivery to integrated or external water baths, analytical instruments, incubators, and wet processing stations.

Laboratory furnaces are composed of a heating element connected to a sampling chamber and regulated by a digital controller.

Laboratory evaporators remove solvents, such as acetone, methanol, DMSO or water, from aqueous samples for solvent recycling or distillation, sample purification, compound separation, or sample concentration.

Laboratory mixers consist of an oscillating, motorized platform, designed to hold flasks, beakers, or tubes, installed onto a stabilizing base and connected to an analog or digital controller to regulate the movement and speed of the platform. 

Unlike high-speed lab shakers or vortexers, which mix samples in orbital or vortex motions, mixers gently agitate samples in linear rocking, tilting or rotating motions. Commonly used in molecular biology or biochemistry labs, mixers are ideal for gel staining, western blotting, or hybridization assays.

Laboratory mills, or laboratory mill grinders, utilize mechanical force to pulverize non-homogenous, batch samples into smaller, representative, homogenous samples for analytical and quality control testing. Mills are composed of a grinding element, such as a beater or cutting blade, housed within a stainless steel or disposable plastic milling chamber. The grinding element is connected to a high-speed motor regulated by a timer or digital controller.

Water baths, or wet baths, consist of a stainless steel basin filled with heated water and equipped with a digital controller. Water baths are used for sample thawing, reagent warming, substrate melting, coliform determinations, and bacteriological assays by clinical labs, academic research facilities, environmental testing laboratories, and food product quality control testers.

Laboratory hot plates consist of a heating element installed underneath a plate surface, manufactured from conductive steel or plastic, connected to a digital or analog controller.

Ubiquitous in clinical, production and research labs, hot plates are used to slowly and safely heat samples, reagents and chemicals without the dangers associated with the open flame of a Bunsen burner.

Laboratory dispersers, sometimes referred to as high-speed shearers or rotor-stator mixers, are a type of overhead stirrer designed to disperse, rather than mix, compounds. As opposed to homogenizers, which uniformly mix two or more miscible components, dispersers create a mixture of two or more immiscible components owing to liquid-liquid or solid-liquid phase separations. Popular dispersions include emulsions (liquid particles dispersed into another liquid) or grind dispersions (solid particles dispersed into a liquid).