The material is first frozen and transferred to a drying chamber. During the drying stage, the material in the chamber is subjected to a high vacuum. Heat is applied carefully to the material, and a condenser is used in the chamber to collect the water. When water is leaving rapidly, its heat of vaporization is taken from the material and helps to keep it cool and safe. As the material dries, this cooling diminishes so that it is possible to overheat and damage the material.
Heat supplies the energy necessary for sublimation of the water. An ice crystal is composed of pure water that is rather rigidly confined in a crystal lattice. The molecules have natural vibrations, however, so that extra thermal energy increases the probability of breaking free. When the water molecule breaks free, it diffuses through the already dried surface of the solid and sublimes. As the water molecules diffuse and sublime , the thickness of the dry outer surface of the specimen increases, and thus more energy is required to transport the molecules through the dry shell. The actual force driving water vapor from the drying boundary, through the dry shell and to the specimen surface, is a concentration gradient, and not, as some would assume, the vacuum sucking on the sample.
As the molecules sublime and use up the latent thermal energy, the thermal reserves in the specimen are depleted and thus the probability of further sublimation decreases. Rate of transfer through the dried solids is low. The rate of drying of the specimen decreases until such time that so much external thermal energy would have to be supplied that the specimen may be harmed. Sublimation can continue safely if no heat is supplied, but drying time is greatly extended.
The removal of the water vapor that reaches the specimen surface is critical to completion of the drying process. The water molecules that have successfully sublimed must be removed from the free space of the vacuum. The molecules move through the vacuum-induced free space and are trapped by condensation. Some condensers are plates, but a device known as a 'cold finger' is common. The 'cold finger' is a long thin condenser.
Wet samples can be frozen by placing them in a vacuum. The more energetic molecules escape, and the temperature of the sample falls by evaporative cooling. Eventually it freezes. About 15% of the water in the wet material is lost.
The simplest form of lyophilizer would consist of a vacuum chamber into which wet sample material could be placed, together with a means of removing water vapor so as to freeze the sample by evaporative cooling and freezing and then maintain the water-vapor pressure below the triple-point pressure. The temperature of the sample would then continue to fall below the freezing point and sublimation would slow down until the rate of heat gain in the sample by conduction, convection, and radiation was equal to the rate of heat loss as the more energetic molecules sublimed away were removed.
This simple approach creates numerous difficulties. When a material is frozen by evaporative cooling it froths as it boils. This frothing can be suppressed by low-speed centrifugation. Centrifugation also helps to dry faster by reducing material thickness and exposing a greater surface area.
An alternative is to freeze the material before it is placed under vacuum. This is commonly done with small laboratory lyophilizers where material is frozen inside a flask. The flask is then attached to a manifold connected to the ice condenser. To speed the process the material can be shell-frozen by rotating the flask in a low-temperature bath, giving a large surface area and small thickness of material.
For larger-scale equipment it is usual to place the material on product-support shelves inside the drying chamber, which can be cooled so that the material is frozen at atmospheric pressure before the vacuum is created. Without a controlled heat in[put to the sample its temperature would fall until drying was virtually at a standstill. For this reason it is usual to arrange a heat supply to the product-support shelves so that, after their initial use for freezing the product, they can be used to provide heat to replace the energy lost with the subliming water vapor and maintain the product at a constant low temperature.
One milliliter of ice produces more than 1,000,000 ml. of water vapor at typical lyophilization cycle pressures. The more energy-efficient vacuum pumps cannot handle large quantities of water vapor. For this reason it is usual to fit a refrigerated trap (called the ice condenser) between the lyophilization chamber and the vacuum pump. Modern lyophilizers incorporate refinements.
The most important are listed below: