Pneumatic reactors are an important class of bioreactors widely used in biotechnological processes. The growing interest in these reactors is mainly related to their good mass transfer capacity, as well as lower operating costs, due to the simple mechanical structure. Knowledge of the transport phenomena and hydrodynamics of bioreactors is important to enable definition of the best bioreactor model and operating conditions for a specific bioprocess. Several performance parameters are used to evaluate bioreactors, with the imposed shear being one of the most difficult to quantify. For stirred tanks, the fragmentation of microorganisms has been well correlated with a hydrodynamic parameter called the “energy dissipation/circulation function” (EDCF). However, there have been no estimates of the EDCF for pneumatic bioreactors. The present work proposes a methodology to estimate the EDCF for different pneumatic bioreactors and operating conditions. The difficulty in estimating the EDCF for pneumatic bioreactors is in defining the volume of higher energy dissipation. Here, this was achieved employing the maximal shear rate obtained using computational fluid dynamics simulations. The estimated volume was validated by comparing pellet fragmentation in conventional and pneumatic bioreactors, under conditions that led to similar EDCF values.