A particle based model to simulate microscale morphological changes of plant tissues during drying.

Area of Science:

• Food Engineering
• Biophysics
• Computational Modeling

Background:

• Optimizing plant material quality requires understanding microscopic physical changes during processing.
• Grid-based models struggle with complex biological materials and extreme deformations during drying.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a meshfree particle-based model capable of simulating extreme deformations in plant tissues during drying.
• To accurately represent cellular structures and interactions for improved microscale modeling.

Main Methods:

• Coupling Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) for protoplasm and Discrete Element Method (DEM) for cell walls.
• Initiating plant cells as hexagons, aggregating them into tissues, and incorporating middle lamella characteristics.
• Simulating drying by adjusting moisture content, turgor pressure, and cell wall contraction.

Main Results:

• The model successfully simulates plant tissues undergoing excessive moisture reduction, including cell wall wrinkling.
• It offers improved replication of real tissues and efficient computation through cell-cell interactions compared to existing SPH-DEM models.
• Model predictions demonstrated strong qualitative and quantitative agreement with experimental data on dried plant tissues.

Conclusions:

• The developed meshfree particle model provides a flexible approach for studying microscale morphological changes in various plant cellular structures during dehydration.
• This method enhances the simulation of plant tissue drying, offering valuable insights for food engineering applications.