Abstract
An essential prerequisite for the efficient biomechanical tailoring of crops is to accurately relate mechanical behavior to compositional and morphological properties across different length scales. In this article, we develop a multiscale approach to predict macroscale stiffness and strength properties of crop stem materials from their hierarchical microstructure. We first discuss the experimental multiscale characterization based on microimaging (micro-CT, light microscopy, transmission electron microscopy) and chemical analysis, with a particular focus on oat stems. We then derive in detail a general micromechanics-based model of macroscale stiffness and strength. We specify our model for oats and validate it against a series of bending experiments that we conducted with oat stem samples. In the context of biomechanical tailoring, we demonstrate that our model can predict the effects of genetic modifications of microscale composition and morphology on macroscale mechanical properties of thale cress that is available in the literature.
Highlights
Recent advances in genomics have paved the way for biomechanical tailoring of crops (Brulé et al 2016)
We first validate our micromechanics-based model against four-point bending tests that we performed on oat stems
We illustrate the potential of our model for simulating and understanding the biomechanical tailoring of crop stems
Summary
Recent advances in genomics have paved the way for biomechanical tailoring of crops (Brulé et al 2016). In contrast to our work on bamboo that focused on functionally graded type materials, we focus here on the configuration of an inner layer of foamlike parenchyma cells surrounded by a dense outer shell, which is typical for crop stems (Gibson et al 1995). This morphology brings along specific challenges for deriving microstructure–property relationships, which we describe and suggest solutions for. For the example of oat, we experimentally profile the compositional and morphological properties across the hierarchical levels in the crop stem material, using microimaging technologies such as micro-CT, light microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy along with chemical composition analysis at the relevant scale.
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