Abstract
During their evolutionary history, plants have developed an amazing resistance to various weather conditions, in particular with regard to temperatures below freezing point. In contrast, a phase change of the pore-space content from (liquid) water to (solid) ice within standard construction materials frequently leads to damage. Therefore, our vision is to transfer, at least in part, some of the strategies and structural properties from frost-resistant plants to construction materials.
In this contribution basic strategies and structural properties of frost-resistant plants are introduced. Furthermore, an accompanying customised modelling strategy is proposed. Since plant tissues are formed by highly ordered arrangements of single cells with prescribed sizes, shapes and cell-wall properties, they represent graded (anisotropic) natural porous materials. These structural traits are involved in dealing with frost events. The presented continuum-mechanical modelling approach, based on the Theory of Porous Media (TPM), allows for the description of multicomponent and multiphasic materials. First numerical simulations show the influence of structural traits on the water transport within plant tissues.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Markus Günther, Dagmar Voigt (Institute of Botany at the Technical University of Dresden) and Ioanis Grigoridis (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart) for allowing us to use the Cryo-SEM. Furthermore, we are grateful to Barbara Ditsch (Botanical Garden, Dresden) for providing fresh samples.
This work has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre (SFB/Transregio) 141 ‘Biological Design and Integrative Structures’/A01.
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Eurich, L., Schott, R., Wagner, A., Roth-Nebelsick, A., Ehlers, W. (2016). Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transport in Frost-Resistant Plant Tissues. In: Knippers, J., Nickel, K., Speck, T. (eds) Biomimetic Research for Architecture and Building Construction. Biologically-Inspired Systems, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46374-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46374-2_6
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