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.
