Journal
COMPUTER METHODS IN BIOMECHANICS AND BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
Volume 20, Issue 4, Pages 343-354Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/10255842.2016.1233328
Keywords
Flexural stiffness; torsional stiffness; twist-to-bend ratio; rhubarb
Funding
- Fonds de Recherche du Quebec-Nature et Technologies (FQRNT)
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Plant petioles can be considered as hierarchical cellular structures, displaying geometric features defined at multiple length scales. Their macroscopic mechanical properties are the cumulative outcome of structural properties attained at each level of the structural hierarchy. This work appraises the compliance of a rhubarb stalk by determining the stalk's bending and torsional stiffness both computationally and experimentally. In our model, the irregular cross-sectional shape of the petiole and the layers of the constituent tissues are considered to evaluate the stiffness properties at the structural level. The arbitrary shape contour of the petiole is generated with reasonable accuracy by the Gielis superformula. The stiffness and architecture of the constituent layered tissues are modeled by using the concept of shape transformers so as to obtain the computational twist-to-bend ratio for the petiole. The rhubarb stalk exhibits a ratio of flexural to torsional stiffness 4.04 (computational) and 3.83 (experimental) in comparison with 1.5 for isotropic, incompressible, circular cylinders, values that demonstrate the relative structural compliance to flexure and torsion.
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