A coarse-grained multiscale model to simulate morphological changes of food-plant tissues undergoing drying

Area of Science:

• Food Engineering
• Computational Biology
• Materials Science

Background:

• Numerical modeling optimizes food drying parameters for improved product quality.
• Meshfree numerical models excel at simulating cellular deformations during drying.
• Extending meshfree methods to bulk tissues is computationally intensive.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel coarse-grained multiscale numerical model for predicting bulk food-plant tissue deformation during drying.
• To overcome the computational challenges of simulating large-scale tissue changes.

Main Methods:

• Incorporation of meshfree features into a coarse-grained multiscale numerical model.
• Simulation of morphological changes in apple tissues at microscale and macroscale levels.

Main Results:

• Realistic simulation of apple tissue morphological changes achieved.
• Computational time reduced to 2% of previous methods for microscale and macroscale simulations.
• The proposed model offers more convenient computational implementation than contemporary multiscale models.

Conclusions:

• The novel meshfree-based multiscale model efficiently and accurately simulates drying-induced morphological changes in cellular materials.
• This approach shows potential for future expansion to heterogeneous plant tissues across different spatial scales.