■Biomimetics

Hello everybody.

We’ll deliver the content of “Biomimetics”,especially plant cirrus for bitter gourd.

■Green curtain of bitter gourd or bottle gourd
In our Head Office,we have worked on planting green plants for making a green curtain to shade sun light in summer such as bitter gourd or bottle gourd that are vine having cirrus.
It’s helpful for child educations and community activities needless to say carbon reduction to make a green curtain.
Based on this our effort,we were awarded the Special Prize from the Green Curtain Contest Tokyo in 2012.

■ Stress concentration
Plants,such as bitter gourd or bottle gourd have “cirrus” that supports and grows themselves or fruit twining it around to a fence and a net that shapes highly characteristic,springy. This springy has the “anti-rotation point” in the center of the cirrus between the twine direction of clockwise and counter-clockwise.
Plant cirrus will be cut if it is one twine direction when the plant swings in the wind.
However,if there are two different directions of spirals which are opposite to each other in conjunction with “anti-rotation point”,cirrus won’t be twisted cut.
This phenomena was revealed by the computer simulation that forming spiral. It seems to have evolved by itself to avoid stress concentration in cirrus.

Luceo has been developing and manufacturing high-quality strain inspectors that incorporate in-house polarizing plates and wave plates for many years. Our instruments are active in sampling inspections and manufacturing process control because it enables to check the distribution of retardation and its direction at a glance.
By means of using a polarimeter,it is possible to evaluate a portion where there is stress is concentrated.

https://luceo.co.jp/en/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1504241589-073531.pdf

Reference:佐藤雅人, 梅崎栄作, よじ登り植物の巻きひげの力学的検討, 日本実験力学会第1回研究発表講演会講演論文集 (2001), pp.79-82.

Thank you.