Japanese–English glossary
Scale-down model (SDM)
スケールダウンモデルsukēru daun moderu
A small-scale version of a commercial process step, such as a bench-top bioreactor or a small chromatography column, designed to reproduce the conditions and performance of the full-scale step. It is used for process characterization, virus clearance studies and troubleshooting, because full-scale runs are too costly for those experiments. Results only count if the model is shown to represent full scale, by comparing performance and quality outputs between the two (scale-down model qualification). Japanese documents also use the abbreviation SDM.