1988 Volume 50 Issue 2 Pages 75-83
The complexity of agricultural products in their shape and material stracture often causes difficulties in measurements of parameters of their mechanical properties. The direct application of measuring methods used for non biological materials is not always effective to agricultural products and would give unreliable data even on the simplest parameters known as the elastic moduli. Taking physiological characteristics of living cells as kell as anisotropy and inhomogeneity into consideration is necessary for studying physical properties of a plant material. The water potential of plant tissue relates the physiological state of living tissue of plant to the mechanical behavior of cellular materials.
In this study, it is assumed that a plant material is homogeneous and isotropic at cellular level. The consideration of mechanical behavior of plant materials is based on this assumption. The overall objective of this work is to develop a total instrumentation and software system capable of estimating parameters of physical properties of a plant material.
In this paper, the finite element inverse analysis that plays a key role in this software system is discussed. The finite element software developed is used to calculate the elastic moduli and the water potential effective coefficient from deformation of the cellular material.
