Abstract
ABSTRACTThe leaf petiole is an organ that connects the leaf blade to the stem of a plant. From a structural viewpoint, the petiole resembles a cantilever beam that withstands torsional loading due to wind action and bending deformation due to gravity acting on the leaf blade. During growth, the petiole develops defined structural features at multiple length scales, which synergistically determine its mechanical response to external stimuli. The focus of this study is on the hierarchical level (n=3) of the cellular tissue. The goal is to capture the elastic properties of the cellular tissues of the leaf petiole in Philodendron melinonii at that hierarchy. Since the microstructure of the plant tissues resembles a non-periodic cellular pattern, we resort to a 2-D Finite Edge Centroidal Voronoi tessellation (FECVT) to generate a realistic network of polygonal cells. An analysis based on finite element analysis (FEA) is performed to explore the relation between the effective stiffness of Voronoi model and the properties of the cellular tissue. The effective (homogenized) elastic properties of the cellular tissue can be used to calculate the overall flexural and torsional stiffness of the P. melinonii petiole. The FEA of the Voronoi microstructure depicts the anisotropic stiffness properties of the P. melinonii tissue and its dependence with the graded cellularity.
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