An Air‐Cooled,High‐Yield,Compact and Inexpensive Teflon Still for High‐Purity Reagents

Mattinson’s (1972) well‐known simple design of a sub‐boiling still for the preparation of ultra high‐purity reagents consists of two Teflon bottles connected at right angles with one acting as the feed bottle and heated on its upper surface by infrared radiation and the other kept in a cold water bath serving both as the condenser and receiver. Connection of the two bottles in a vertical configuration and replacement of radiative surface heating with conductive bulk heating result in an equally simple and inexpensive still but with a smaller footprint, much larger yield and higher energy efficiency using only ambient air cooling. It can be easily configured for tandem distillation, supply of continuously purified reagent and fractional distillation. Ease and very low cost of fabrication of this still may be of particular interest to many geochemical laboratories requiring up to 500 ml of mineral acids and other common reagents per day.