Modelling the capture, by pine cones, of wind-dispersed pollen

Abstract

Paper presented at the 6th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, South Africa, 30 June - 2 July, 2008.

In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was used to simulate the dominant influences of conelet aerodynamics. To this end, airflow and particle trajectories around a virtual conelet have been visualized at a very high resolution to reveal the mechanisms of the conelet-pollen interaction. Furthermore, surfaces of the conelet have been selected to 'absorb' particles so that pollen capture could be exactly quantified. Therefore three-dimensional imaging has been introduced to obtain accurate representations of conelet morphology for aerodynamic analysis of wind pollination using CFD. The results of spore captures will be compared to results obtained for a facsimile (/figure 1/) in wind tunnel experiments. Possible influence factors for pollen capture are scale camber or orientation. Series of conelets are planned to be produced, each series varying experimentally in a single feature (or more if interactions are evident). A feature is demonstrated to be a major influence if its variation is systematically associated with the aerodynamic performance of conelets.