A meshfree model for plant tissue deformations during drying

Abstract

Plant tissue has a complex cellular structure which is an aggregate of individual cells bonded by middle lamella. During drying processes, plant tissue undergoes extreme deformations which are mainly driven by moisture removal and turgor loss. Numerical modelling of this problem becomes challenging when conventional grid-based modelling techniques such as finite element and finite difference methods are considered due to grid-based limitations. This work presents a meshfree approach to model and simulate the deformations of plant tissue during drying. This method demonstrates the fundamental capabilities of meshfree methods in handling extreme deformations of multiphase systems. A simplified two-dimensional tissue model is developed by aggregating individual