Abstract
A better understanding of plant cell micromechanics would enhance the current opinion on “how things are happening” inside a plant cell, enabling more detailed insights into plant physiology as well as processing plant biomaterials. However, with the contemporary laboratory equipment, the experimental investigation of cell micromechanics has been a challenging task due to diminutive spatial and time scales involved. In this investigation, a three-dimensional (3-D) coupled Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Coarse-Grained (CG) computational approach has been employed to model micromechanics of single plant cells going through drying or dehydration. This meshfree-based computational model has conclusively demonstrated that it can effectively simulate the behaviour of stress and strain in a plant cell being compressed at different levels of dryness: ranging from a fresh state to an extremely dried state. In addition, different biological and physical circumstances have been approximated through the proposed novel computational framework in the form of different turgor pressures, strain rates, mechanical properties and cell sizes. The proposed computational framework has potential not only to study the micromechanical characteristics of plant cellular structure during drying, but also other equivalent, biological structures and processes with relevant modifications. There are no underlying difficulties in adopting the model to replicate other types of cells and more sophisticated micromechanical phenomena of the cells under different external loading conditions.
Highlights
Plant materials are comprised of biological tissues, where each tissue is approximated as a network of plant cells separated by intercellular spaces
The meshfree-based computational model proposed in this article has conclusively demonstrated that it can favourably simulate stress-strain-time behaviour of dried plant cells that are being compressed
To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first computational study to model the micromechanical behaviour of plant cells that are being dried and compressed
Summary
Plant materials are comprised of biological tissues, where each tissue is approximated as a network of plant cells separated by intercellular spaces. Cell fluid was modelled using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), which has been a viable and popular choice to overcome remeshing issues found in classical finite element based numerical models Through this coupled SPH-DEM meshfree-based framework, the dynamic response of a small periodic tissue under compression, tension and shear loading was predicted. The above discussed SPH-DEM based models have only been developed for fresh tissues This raises a question: “Can the micromechanics of dried plant cells be predicted using the results for fresh cells?” or “Does a dried plant cell behave in a significantly different manner compared to a fresh cell under mechanical stress?”. The second numerical experiment evaluates the effects of key model parameters: initial turgor pressure, compression rate and cell wall properties on cell micromechanics At this point, three levels of dryness are used for further elaboration of parameter sensitivity: fresh (0% dried), moderately dried (50% dried) and extremely dried (90% dried). The Conclusions section emphasizes the flexibility and potential of the proposed model for diversified computational biological investigations while highlighting limitations and potential future work
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