Evaporating solvents away from your product is, and I’m sure always will be, a standard part of pretty much any workup procedure. Like most labs I have a rotary evaporator, but unlike most labs mine sits in the corner gathering dust, because I use a different thing entirely.
Before Vapourtec manufactured flow chemistry platforms, we (the royal we, I wasn’t in the company then) developed the V10 evaporator, now owned and sold elsewhere. But, I have the original prototype in my lab here at Vapourtec. It’s not showroom standard, let’s get that out of the way from the start, but for lab scale syntheses, boy is it good. Much of my work is in the 10-20 ml scale and collected into 20 ml synthesis vials. These fit directly onto the V10 and the solvent is pulled away, leaving your now dry and solvent free sample in a sample vial and that’s it. Either it goes into the dessicator for a bit to make sure it’s totally dry or for samples that were never wet in the first place, goes straight in the post to the NMR lab. No hassle, no having to bend a spatula to reach that really awkward bit just below the neck of the round-bottomed flask, no having to worry about the person before you bumping their sample up inside the rotovap, ready to contaminate your own (though I’m the only person in the lab, so I wouldn’t really have anyone else to blame). Its handy for drying down larger volumes too, there is a piece of tubing that I can connect to a pump, and continuously add solution while the evaporation is still running; pump slower than the rate of evaporation and there’s no risk of bumping.
I do have the rotovap on standby if the V10 had a problem, but in the 2 years I’ve been at Vapourtec it hasn’t (often) missed a beat.