Modeling Growth of Plants for Biologically Inspired Structures of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Concrete

Abstract

Engineering challenges are often approached by identifying and studying biological principals and adapting them to the task to be solved. Biological structures are considered to be optimized, since evolution influenced the shape and topology of the structure over a long time span. The main driving force is the adaption to the boundary conditions present in the environment of the biological system. Therefore, many optimization procedures are contained in the growth processes, resulting in the final shape and topology of the biological structure. The accumulation of matter in the system with the resulting spatial expansion can be described by continuum mechanics. The insights gained by this approach allow for a precise description and three-dimensional modeling of the biological structure. The obtained growth formulations can be applied independently of the utilized material model. As a consequence, the growth formulations can be applied to engineering challenges within numerical simulations to obtain biologically inspired designs for engineering structures. In civil engineering, a new and promising material, which is still researched frequently, is carbon fiber reinforced concrete. This material allows for a reduction of concrete required in engineering designs. Therefore, the obtained formulations are employed for carbon fiber reinforced concrete structures, since new design approaches for this material are required.