Original article: Modelling water droplet movement on a leaf surface

  • Authors:
  • Moa'ath N. Oqielat;Ian W. Turner;John A. Belward;Scott W. McCue

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • Mathematics and Computers in Simulation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Abstract: Modelling droplet movement on leaf surfaces is an important component in understanding how water, pesticide or nutrient is absorbed through the leaf surface. A simple mathematical model is proposed in this paper for generating a realistic, or natural looking trajectory of a water droplet traversing a virtual leaf surface. The virtual surface is comprised of a triangular mesh structure over which a hybrid Clough-Tocher seamed element interpolant is constructed from real-life scattered data captured by a laser scanner. The motion of the droplet is assumed to be affected by gravitational, frictional and surface resistance forces and the innovation of our approach is the use of thin-film theory to develop a stopping criterion for the droplet as it moves on the surface. The droplet model is verified and calibrated using experimental measurement; the results are promising and appear to capture reality quite well.