A new vial cap design for the Pioreactor 🎉

We mentioned in a previous blog post that we are now 3D printing our vial caps, and how this opened up a much larger design space for us. Well, introducing the first stop in this design space: our new Vial Cap A! 

This vial cap loses the rubber grommets, which gives us back a lot of space on the cap's top. Instead of the silicone tubes being held in place by the grommets, the four silicone tubes are tightly inserted directly against the plastic. 

Speaking of plastic, we've improved upon the plastic we use. We are now using Prusa's PC Blend Carbon Fibre. This plastic has an even higher temperature tolerance, better dimensional accuracy, and is stronger than the previous PC Blend plastic we used. 

Finally, the biggest change was the addition of a G1/8 threaded hole. This threaded hole allows us and users to add new instruments or additions securly into the culture. By default, we close the hole with one of our plugs, but there are lots of opportunities to use the threaded hole: thermowells, more silicone tubes for IO, gas injection, access to headspace, sampling ports, etc.

How do you get these new caps?

All Pioreactors now ship with the Vial Cap A design, and you can purchase the new caps from our online shop, too. 

We are also open sourcing the 3MF files so you can print these yourself! Along with this design, we've also open sourced a blank cap design, too.

Happy growing! 🦠