Mimicking the pattern formation of fruits and leaves using gel materials

Abstract

Gel materials have recently gained more attention due to its unique capability of large and reversible volumetric changes. This study explores the possibility of mimicking the pattern formation of certain natural fruits during their growing process and leaves during drying processes through the swelling and de-swelling of gel materials. This will hopefully provide certain technical explanations on the morphology of fruits and plants. We adopt the inhomogeneous field gel theory to predict the deformation configurations of gel structures to describe the morphology of natural fruits and plants. The growing processes of apple and capsicum are simulated by imposing appropriate boundary conditions and field loading via varying the chemical potential from their immature to mature stages. The drying processes of three types of leaves with different vein structures are also investigated. The simulations lead to promising results and demonstrate that pattern formation of fruits and plants may be described from mechanical perspective by the behavior of gel materials based on the inhomogeneous field theory.