Drag Reduction, from Bending to Pruning

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that bending and pruning are equally effective natural mechanisms for reducing drag in plants and aquatic organisms, using idealized models to compare their efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework showing that bending and pruning are equally efficient in drag reduction, regardless of their differences in physical implementation.

Findings

Bending and pruning are equally effective in drag reduction.

Idealized models can compare different reconfiguration mechanisms.

Both mechanisms can be combined for optimal drag mitigation.

Abstract

Most plants and benthic organisms have evolved efficient reconfiguration mechanisms to resist flow-induced loads. These mechanisms can be divided into bending, in which plants reduce their sail area through elastic deformation, and pruning, in which the loads are decreased through partial breakage of the structure. In this work, we show by using idealized models that these two mechanisms or, in fact, any combination of the two, are equally efficient to reduce the drag experienced by terrestrial and aquatic vegetation.