MPM modelling of the cellular collapse of bio-products due to capillary forces
Résumé
The Material Point Method (MPM) was implemented to predict the mechanical behavior of the cellular arrangement of biological tissues. The choice of this method was motivated by its ability to easily account for the actual and complex morphology of bioproducts at the cellular level and to deal with large deformations. The vectorial image processing facilities provided by the custom software MeshPore allow such a procedure to be easily applied to microscopic images. In this work, the morphology of the cellular structure is observed using an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM). Our MPM model has been adapted to model the collapse of the cellular structure due to a negative water pressure inside the cell lumens. The simulations illustrate how the cellular morphology, resulting from the formation of radial lines of cells, induced a collapse mainly in the tangential direction of wood. The computed deformation in the tangential direction is roughly five fold the radial one. Finally, we discuss how the same modeling chain of tools, from image to computed results, could be applied to other bio-products, namely the cellular structure of fruits or vegetables