A 3-D coupled Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Coarse-Grained model to simulate drying mechanisms of small cell aggregates

•3-D Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)-Coarse-Grained (CG) cell aggregate model.•Ability to model the morphological changes of small cell aggregates during drying.•Sensitivity analyses on smoothing length, wall forces and mass transfer parameters.•Paving the pathway to model complicated physics and larger tissues in plant tissues. Recently, meshfree-based computational modelling approaches have become popular in modelling biological phenomena due to their superior ability to simulate large deformations, multiphase phenomena and complex physics compared to the conventional grid-based methods. In this article, small plant cell aggregates were simulated using a three dimensional (3-D) Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) and Coarse-Grained (CG) coupled computational approach to predict the morphological behaviour during drying. The model predictions of these cell aggregate models have been compared qualitatively and quantitatively through comparisons with experimental findings. The results show that the shrinkage and wrinkling behaviour of cell cluster models are in fairly good agreement with real cellular structures. The agreement between the cell aggregate model predictions and the experimental findings are closer in the high and medium moisture content values (X/X0 ≥ 0.3), than highly dried stages (X/X0 < 0.3). Further, optimisation and sensitivity studies have been conducted on model parameters such as particle resolution, smoothing length, mass transfer characteristics and wall forces. Overall, the 3-D nature of this model allows it to predict real 3-D morphological changes more realistically compared to the previous meshfree based 2-D cellular drying models. The proposed 3-D modelling approach has a higher potential to be used to model larger plant tissues with complicated physical and mechanical interactions as well as their multiscale interactions.