A flow chamber with converging and diverging sections is designed to expose cultured bovine aortic endothelial cells to positive and negative WSSGs. The chamber is designed such that effects of gradients at constant magnitude could be studied and simultaneously compared with zero gradient regions. The chamber was manufactured in the local machine shop. A flow system was designed for the  chamber to replicate the physiological shear stress gradients in the endothelium to study the effects of positive and negative wall shear stress gradients. The designed flow system was used for multiple studies at hemodynamics lab, State University of New York, Buffalo.

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A parallel flow channel offers a constant shear stress region. A parallel channel can be modified (by changing height or width) to obtain variable shear stress distribution. A particular height or width variation can be found with the help of calculus, for which shear stress will grow or fall linearly, i.e. the shear stress gradient is constant in this region. The goal of flow chamber design was to achieve regions of constant wall shear stress gradients, this can be done using a converging (positive WSSG) and diverging (negative WSSG) channel.



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Figure 1. Theoretical Design



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