EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Tailoring their resistance to twisting and bending under mechanical loading is a necessary evolutionary response of many plants. In particular, increasing the ”twist-to-bend ratio” is often advantageous as it accommodates several effects such as streamlining with the wind in order to reduce drag forces. High twist-to-bend ratios can be achieved by changes to the geometry of the plant stems cross-section or the arrangement of material such as reinforcing fibre strands inside the cross-section.
With the help of mathematical models such as phase field models and St.Venant’s theory of pure torsion we can analyze this problem and compare numerically optimized shapes to plant specimens and thus, using steepest descent methods and finite element analysis, elaborate ways to achieve optimized cross-sections with little effort. Further we can enhance certain parameters such as the number and the arrangement of reinforcing fibre strands inside the plant stems cross-section and consider the influence of the materials used. Overall, these methods provide a useful tool in the construction of shape optimized bioinspired materials.