A coupled SPH-DEM model for micro-scale structural deformations of plant cells during drying

A meshfree model for plant tissue deformations during drying

“…We use a similar cell fluid model to that of Karunasena et al [19,20], involving four types of force interactions: fluid pressure forces F p , fluid viscous forces F v , wall-fluid repulsion forces F rw and wall-fluid attraction forces F a (see Figure 3). The resultant effect of these forces gives the total force on any fluid particle i as influenced by the neighbouring fluid particles i and wall particles k:…”

“…Here, the top circular surface of any such cell is used as a 2D model of the whole cell [19,20]. The model incorporates two main components: cell fluid and cell wall.…”

“…Detailed formulae for all forces were derived by Karunasena et al [19,20], and the details are not included here. Furthermore, Karunasena et al [20] hypothesized that cell wall mass proportionately reduces along with the cell fluid mass during drying.…”

“…As well as the basic cell wall model features introduced by Karunasena et al [19], two additional features are used for the cell model: cell wall contractions and moisture removal during drying [20]. The cell wall is first discretised into a set of interconnected elements, as shown in Figure 1(d).…”

“…However, there is a clear research gap for a numerical model based on meshfree methods, specifically for deformations of plant cells during drying. To fulfil this gap, Karunasena et al [17,18,19,20] developed a sph-dem based single cell model to study drying related cellular deformation. This is a continuation of that work and our main focus here is to introduce a basic tissue model based on the previous single cell model with several improvements.…”