Multiscale modeling of oat and wheat stems under wind stress

Lodging impedes the successful cultivation of cereal crops. Complex anatomy, morphology and environmental interactions make identifying reliable and measurable traits for breeding challenging. Therefore, we present a unique collaboration among disciplines for plant science, modeling and simulations, and experimental fluid dynamics in a broader context of breeding lodging resilient wheat and oat. We ran comprehensive wind tunnel experiments to quantify the stem bending behavior of both cereals under controlled aerodynamic conditions. Measured phenotypes from experiments concluded that the wheat stems response is stiffer than the oat. However, these observations did not in themselves establish causal relationships of this observed behavior with the physical traits of the plants.  To further investigate we created an independent finite element simulation framework integrating our recently developed multiscale material modeling approach to predict the mechanical response of wheat and oat st..., ,