C.WASH

The CYTENA C.WASH washes microplates by spinning them. Where a conventional plate washer lowers a manifold of needles into the wells to aspirate, the C.WASH takes the plate into a drum and uses centrifugal force to throw the liquid out — CYTENA describes it as washing microwell plates using centrifugal force, without needles or pipette tips, for the non-contact washing of cells and ELISA assays. Nothing enters the well, so there is no needle to carry material from one well to the next and no tip to consume.

Fresh buffer goes back in on the way out. The instrument has a dispense head — 8-needle or 16-needle — fed from up to four auto-switching liquid input channels, and CYTENA states the angled dispensing allows aiming at the well walls to preserve growing cells and bound capture antibodies. Waste leaves the drum through an active pump. The published residual volume after a spin is under 0.1 µL per well across all supported plate formats, which is the number the whole design argument rests on: fewer wash cycles are needed to reach a given carryover.

At a glance

Type	Centrifugal, non-contact microplate washer and dispenser
Plate formats	96- and 384-well
Residual volume	<0.1 µL per well, all plate formats
Wash cycle	96-well one cycle ≤47 s; 384-well one cycle ≤52 s
Dispensing	8-needle or 16-needle head, up to 4 auto-switching liquid inputs
Instrument automation interface	SiLA2, per CYTENA
Revolution control	None — the device is a plate location only. No callable operations.

Specifications

CYTENA publishes the following, identically on the C.WASH product page and in the C.WASH product brochure.

Plate compatibility (format)	96, 384
Plate compatibility (height)	14.4 mm
Centrifugal forces	5 to 3500 rpm (~400 g)
Dispense head	8-needle, 16-needle
Liquid inputs	Auto switching (internal) for up to 4 liquid input channels
Dispensing accuracy & precision (standard dispenser)	<5% @ 300 µL across the plate; <3% (CV) @ 300 µL
Dead volume, internal (tube volume)	8 mL
Dead volume (liquid switch/priming)	4 mL
Volume range, standard dispenser	8-needle dispense head: >10 µL; 16-needle dispense head: >5 µL
Dispense speed, 96-well (50 µL)	16 seconds
Dispense speed, 384-well (25 µL)	21 seconds
Processing speed, 96-well, 1 wash cycle	≤47 seconds
Processing speed, 96-well, 2 wash cycles	≤81 seconds
Processing speed, 384-well, 1 wash cycle	≤52 seconds
Processing speed, 384-well, 2 wash cycles	≤85 seconds
Liquid waste system	Active pump for rapid liquid removal from wash drum
User interface	Touchpad (included)
Automation	SiLA2 interface is compatible with third-party integration
Washing efficiency	>99.5% after 1 wash cycle; >99.99% after 2 wash cycles
Dimensions (W × D × H)	385 × 600 × 205 mm
Weight	25 kg

The specification that decides an integration here is plate height: 14.4 mm. A centrifugal washer takes the whole plate inside a drum, so plate geometry is a hard mechanical limit rather than a liquid-handling parameter — deep-well plates and tall-skirt labware are out, and there is no manifold-height adjustment to trade against. CYTENA’s earlier C.WASH brochure stated any SBS format up to 15.2 mm high, so if your labware sits between the two figures, confirm it with CYTENA directly.

The second figure worth planning around is the dispense volume range: CYTENA publishes a floor, not a window — greater than 10 µL on the 8-needle head and greater than 5 µL on the 16-needle head. No upper bound is published, and the accuracy and precision figures are quoted at a single 300 µL point, so performance at other volumes is not something to assume.

Supported methods

None. The Revolution driver for the C.WASH is a declaration only — it registers the instrument and its model so that the device can be added to a system and given a location, and that is the whole of it. There are no operations a method or schedule can call, and no device properties to configure.

In practice that means a mover can place a plate on the C.WASH and pick a plate back off it, and a schedule can treat the location as a stop on a plate’s route. It cannot start a wash, dispense, prime a channel, or read the instrument’s state. Any washing that happens while the plate is there is initiated by an operator at the instrument’s own touchpad, not by Revolution — so a schedule that routes a plate through this location and expects a washed plate back is relying on something outside Revolution to have run.

Integration

Revolution reaches the instrument only as far as its plate location. There is no transport configured, no vendor software in the path and no process model beyond load and unload. CYTENA states the instrument exposes a SiLA2 interface that is compatible with third-party integration; the Revolution driver does not use it.

Prerequisites

• The instrument must be positioned so that the system’s mover can reach its plate carrier, and the carrier must be at the load position when a transfer happens. Revolution does not command the carrier, so nothing in a schedule guarantees this.
• Plates must be within the published 14.4 mm plate height and in 96- or 384-well SBS format.
• Buffer supply, priming and waste must be set up and running at the instrument. Revolution cannot prime a channel or check a waste level.
• Any wash or dispense protocol must be started at the instrument. A schedule step cannot do it.
• Timing must be arranged by hand. Because Revolution cannot ask the instrument whether it is busy, a schedule cannot wait on a wash finishing.

Device configuration

Property	Purpose
—	The driver declares no configurable device properties. Only the standard device settings — name, and the plate location the mover uses — apply.

If you need more of this instrument driven from a schedule, get in touch — the driver is extended on demand.