Related papers: Root growth and force chains in a granular soil
The paper studies a class of variational problems, modeling optimal shapes for tree roots. Given a measure $\mu$ describing the distribution of root hair cells, we seek to maximize a harvest functional $\mathcal{H}$, computing the total…
Microstructural evolution in structural materials is known to occur in response to mechanical loading and can often accommodate substantial plastic deformation through the coupled motion of grain boundaries (GBs). This can produce desirable…
Since Charles Darwin's time, the study of climbing plants on a cylindrical stake has been the subject of numerous articles in plant biology. One of the main ideas for studying the coiling of an elastic plant stem is to consider the growth…
The generation mechanism of growth strains is investigated theoretically by developing an elastic analysis of a wood cell viewed as a composite tube, with layers composed of a ligno-cellulosic material of varying composition and…
We experimentally study the statistics of force-chain evolution in a vertically-tapped two-dimensional granular packing by using photoelastic disks. In this experiment, the tapped granular packing is gradually compacted. During the…
We introduce a general theoretical framework to study the shape dynamics of actively growing and remodeling surfaces. Using this framework we develop a physical model for growing bacterial cell walls and study the interplay of cell shape…
Small-scale mechanical behaviour shows significant departures from classical elastic-plastic theory. In a remarkable number of instances, the strength of a material appears to scale as the reciprocal square root of the smallest length…
In this work, we investigate the forces acting on a flexible fiber dragged through a granular bed. Using discrete element simulations, we observe that, after a sufficiently large displacement, the system reaches a steady state in which both…
Plant morphology emerges from cellular growth and structure. The turgor-driven diffuse growth of a cell can be highly anisotropic: significant longitudinally and negligible radially. Such anisotropy is ensured by cellulose microfibrils…
Granular creep is the slow, sub-yield movement of constituents in a granular packing due to the disordered nature of its grain-scale interactions. Despite the ubiquity of creep in disordered materials, it is still not understood how to best…
We study the dynamics and morphology of grain growth with anisotropic energy and mobility of grain boundaries using a generalized phase field model. In contrast to previous studies, both inclination and misorientation of the boundaries are…
The physics of micron-scale biological colonies usually benefits from different out-of-equilibrium sources. In bacterial colonies and cellular tissues, the growth process is among the important active sources that determine the dynamics. In…
How morphogenesis depends on cell properties is an active direction of research. Here, we focus on mechanical models of growing plant tissues, where microscopic (sub)cellular structure is taken into account. In order to establish links…
We measure the torque acting on a rod rotated perpendicular to its axis in a granular bed, through which an upflow of gas is utilized to tune the hydrostatic loading between grains. At low rotation rates the torque is independent of speed,…
Growth pattern dynamics lie at the heart of morphogenesis. Here, we investigate the growth of plant leaves. We compute the conformal transformation that maps the contour of a leaf at a given stage onto the contour of the same leaf at a…
Optimization of crop production requires root systems to function in water uptake, nutrient use, and anchorage. In maize, two types of nodal roots-subterranean crown and aerial brace roots function in anchorage and water uptake and…
Plants have developed different tropisms: in particular, they re-orient the growth of their branches towards light (phototropism) or upwards (gravitropism). How these tropisms affect the shape of a tree crown remains unanswered. We address…
Grain growth is a ubiquitous and fundamental phenomenon observed in the cellular structures with the grain assembly separated by a network of grain boundaries, including metals and ceramics. However, the underlying mechanism of grain growth…
In biological systems, the growth of cells, tissues, and organs is influenced by mechanical cues. Locally, cell growth leads to a mechanically heterogeneous environment as cells pull and push their neighbors in a cell network. Despite this…
Plants solve complex problems without centralized control, relying instead on growth-driven dynamics to sense, navigate, and optimize resource acquisition. This review presents a unified physical framework for understanding plant behavior…