Characterization of Pulsatile Flow Through A Perfusion Chamber for the Optimization of Spatial Shear Stress Distribution

A perfusion chamber (Hele-Shaw Cell) device is used to impose a pulsatile flow on endothelial cells to examine the cellular response of the cells under cyclic shear stress. The design of the device must guarantee that cells within the testing region are subject to a spatially uniform time-periodic shear stress. For the conditions typically found in applications, the viscous flow in the perfusion chamber exhibits order-unity values of the associated Womersley number. The associated unsteady lubrication problem was solved to determine the spatial distribution of shear stress in a prototypical device of hexagonal planform. Accompanying experiments using particle tracking velocimetry in a fabricated device were used to evaluate theoretical predictions and to assess the spatial shear stress distribution.