What is shear stress and why is it important?
All cells have a limit to the amount of physical stress, also known as “shear stress”, that they can withstand before their cellular envelope ruptures . There are many ways to impart shear stress on a cell, such as sonic vibration, agitation, sparging, pumping, etc. In hollow fiber tangential flow filtration, there are three factors that contribute to shear stress (¥) according to the provided equation: the fiber inner diameter (D), the quantity of fibers (N) and the fluid flow rate (Q). When processing whole cells, care must be taken not to exceed the known shear stress limit for that given cell line.
