Date: 15 April 2025 | Category: News
Vapourtec is excited to announce the release of a new peristaltic pump tube, identified as the “BLACK” tube. The BLACK tube has excellent chemical compatibility across the range of solvents and reagents currently supported by three different tube materials.
Over the last 15 years, many customers have requested a “universal” tube, Vapourtec has listened to this and is excited to NOW deliver this universal tube material.
In 2010 Vapourtec saw the need for an easy-to-use pump capable of handling organometallic reagents and their associated potential for precipitates and out-gassing, not to mention the important requirement to exclude air and moisture. One of the options looked at was peristaltic pumps. Following a chance meeting with the technical expert from a blue-chip advanced materials company, Vapourtec was introduced to a range of composite elastomeric materials highly suitable for the fabrication of chemically resistant, high-pressure (up to 10 bar) peristaltic pump tubes.
Initially, two tube materials were selected RED and BLUE these covered 90% of the range of reagents and solvents used in flow chemistry and offered pressure capability up to 10 bar. Vapourtec developed a revolutionary peristaltic pump to make the most of these excellent tube materials. These peristaltic pumps have been used in many of Vapourtec’s products; E-Series, R2S pump module, SF-10 and SF-10+ standalone pumps and more recently, the Peptide-Builder.
Over the last 15 years Vapourtec has installed thousands of these pumps, and they have proved to be robust and highly reliable. The key attributes of these pumps are, ease-of-use, providing smooth flow, pressure up to 10 bar, pumping gases, handling precipitates and light slurries. The significant improvement we have been focused on is removing the need to change tube material from BLUE to RED when switching between organic solvents and concentrated acids and vice versa.
With the development of this new BLACK universal tube, the need to change tube material has gone. By way of example, a small sub-set of the solvents and reagents capable of being pumped by the BLACK tube include, BuLi, LDA, concentrated acids (including TFA, Nitric, Formic, sulphuric, Hydrochloric, etc), THF, DMF, DMSO amongst many others, a truly universal pump tube.
The BLACK tube is a composite tube manufactured using a reinforced perfluoroelastomer (similar to Kalrez).
The future looks exciting with the potential now for higher flowrate peristaltic pumps and even a higher-pressure version of the Vapourtec peristaltic pump.
See the reference below to explore the organometallic pumping capability of these pumps.
Philip R. D. Murray, Duncan L. Browne, Julio C. Pastre, Chris Butters, Duncan Guthrie, and Steven V. Ley
Organic Process Research & Development 2013 17 (9), 1192-1208
DOI: 10.1021/op4001548
Download a list of >50 publications using the Vapourtec peristaltic pump
Learn more about the Vapourtec SF-10 pump
Download the Vapourtec peristaltic pump tube compatibility guide