A three-dimensional (3-D) meshfree-based computational model to investigate stress-strain-time relationships of plant cells during drying

A better understanding of plant cell micromechanics would enhance the current opinion on “how things are happening” inside a plant cell, enabling more detailed insights into plant physiology as well as processing plant biomaterials. However, with the contemporary laboratory equipment, the experimental investigation of cell micromechanics has been a challenging task due to diminutive spatial and time scales involved. In this investigation, a three-dimensional (3-D) coupled Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Coarse-Grained (CG) computational approach has been employed to model micromechanics of single plant cells going through drying or dehydration. This meshfree-based computational model has conclusively demonstrated that it can effectively simulate the behaviour of stress and strain in a plant cell being compressed at different levels of dryness: ranging from a fresh state to an extremely dried state. In addition, different biological and physical circumstances have been approximated through the proposed novel computational framework in the form of different turgor pressures, strain rates, mechanical properties and cell sizes. The proposed computational framework has potential not only to study the micromechanical characteristics of plant cellular structure during drying, but also other equivalent, biological structures and processes with relevant modifications. There are no underlying difficulties in adopting the model to replicate other types of cells and more sophisticated micromechanical phenomena of the cells under different external loading conditions.