Perfusion & Flow Control Hardware
Pressure-driven pumps, fluidic units and channel slides for defined shear stress, with the published coefficients that tell you what your flow rate actually means.
| Category | Culture Devices & Custom Microfabrication |
|---|---|
| Unit | One pump, one fluidic unit or quad unit, or one pack of channel slides |
| Lead time | 4-12 weeks for pump and fluidic hardware; 1-3 weeks for channel slides and consumables |
| Pricing | Published list price |
| Provenance | Partner manufactured |
| Data current | 2026-09-03 |
Description
Perfusion is where an organ-chip programme stops being a plasticware purchase and becomes an instrument purchase, and the decision is not whether to have flow but how precisely the flow must be defined. If the requirement is medium exchange and some shear, a rocker on a plate does it, MIMETAS OrganoFlow is programmable from 0 to 25 degrees tilt with rocking intervals from 5 seconds to 999 minutes, runs up to 16 OrganoPlates on the L variant, and removes tubing, connectors and priming, which removes the three commonest causes of contamination, bubbles and unattended overnight failure. If the requirement is a wall shear stress in dyn/cm2 that you will defend in a paper, that is a pressure-driven controller with a channel geometry that has a published relationship. ibidi's pump is computer-controlled air pressure from -100 to +100 mbar at plus or minus 1 mbar, driving up to four Fluidic Units for unidirectional recirculating flow. The load-bearing technical point we make sure gets into every RFQ is that shear stress is a property of the channel and not of the pump: using tau = eta x k x phi, ibidi's own published coefficients for one product family run from k = 34.7 on a mu-Slide I 0.8 Luer to k = 512.9 on a 0.2 Luer, a roughly 15-fold difference at the same flow rate, and simply changing the bottom from polymer to glass on a 0.4 Luer moves k from 131.6 to 104.7. Nobody has computed a coefficient for your custom geometry, so we put 'supply the wall shear stress as a function of flow rate for the as-built channel, and state the assumed viscosity' into the specification rather than leaving it as homework.
Why this is hard to buy today
Buyers specify a flow rate as though it were a dose, but ibidi's own published coefficients show the same 1 ml/min produces roughly 15 times more shear in a 0.2 mm channel than in a 0.8 mm one, and swapping to a glass-bottom slide for imaging changes it by 20 percent, so a lab can buy a $24,000 system and still report a shear stress its cells never experienced.
Price evidence
ibidi USD list prices, live-verified against ibidi.com on 2026-09-01: ibidi Pump (computer-controlled air pressure, -100 to +100 mbar, +/-1 mbar accuracy, drives up to four Fluidic Units) $20,715.00; Fluidic Unit $3,270.00; Fluidic Unit Quad $13,085.00; mu-Slide I Luer (single channel 5.0 x 50 mm, 2.5 cm2 growth area, 60 uL per reservoir, #1.5 polymer or #1.5H glass bottom, female Luer) $360.00 per pack. On those figures a single-channel defined-shear system starts around $24,000 before consumables and a four-channel one around $34,000, the honest entry price for the sentence 'cells were exposed to 10 dyn/cm2 of unidirectional laminar shear stress'. MIMETAS publishes OrganoFlow tilt and interval ranges but no price and no shear stress figure, so none is asserted here. Peristaltic and syringe pump prices are not stated because the cross-vendor range is too wide for a single figure to be informative and we did not verify one.
These are supplier list prices we located and recorded, not a quotation from Wetware World. Your price depends on quantity, specification and freight, and is only binding once issued in writing.
What you must specify
A quote cannot be produced without these. Anything you leave open, a supplier will assume, usually expensively.
| # | Parameter |
|---|---|
| 01 | Is shear stress an independent variable in the experiment, or just a culture condition? |
| 02 | Target wall shear stress in dyn/cm2, and the medium viscosity at your temperature and serum concentration |
| 03 | Unidirectional or bidirectional flow (gravity levelling is inherently bidirectional) |
| 04 | Number of channels to be perfused in parallel |
| 05 | Recirculating or single-pass (at 10 dyn/cm2 in a typical channel, recirculation is effectively compulsory) |
| 06 | Channel geometry and bottom material, since both change the shear coefficient |
| 07 | Whether the device is an ibidi channel slide, a plate-format chip, or a custom geometry needing its own derivation |
| 08 | Imaging requirement and whether the perfusion umbilical fits the stage or stage-top incubator |
| 09 | Bubble mitigation: degassing, in-line degasser or bubble trap |
| 10 | Whether the fabricator must deliver a CFD result or a measured flow-to-shear calibration with the part |
Quality documentation
Typically available with this item. What actually ships is confirmed on the quotation, per supplier.
- Manufacturer specification for pressure range and accuracy
- Published shear stress coefficient for the exact catalogue slide supplied
- Channel dimensional specification and bottom material as stated on the product page
- Where a custom channel is involved, an agreed shear-stress derivation or measured calibration as a deliverable
Candidate suppliers
Organisations we have identified as capable. Listing does not imply a partnership, an endorsement, or that they have agreed to quote.
| Organisation | Basis for inclusion |
|---|---|
| ibidi GmbH | Publishes USD list prices per SKU, live-verified 2026-09-01: Pump $20,715.00, Fluidic Unit $3,270.00, Fluidic Unit Quad $13,085.00, mu-Slide I Luer $360.00. Application Note 11 (v6.1, 2022-03-14) publishes shear stress coefficients per slide geometry, the homogeneous-flow region and the viscosity convention eta = 0.0072 dyn.s/cm2. |
| MIMETAS | Publishes OrganoFlow tilt angles 0-25 degrees, rocking intervals 5 seconds to 999 minutes, gravity-driven bidirectional flow by passive levelling, up to 16 OrganoPlates on the L variant, and UniFlow for unidirectional perfusion. No price and no shear stress value published on the cited pages. |
Sources
doc WW-DV-91173 · rev 2026-09-03 · research use only · prices indicative and not binding until quoted in writing