Modelling waving crops in a wind tunnel

Analysis of movie films of a field of barley and observations of the motions of individual plants show that single stalks oscillate at a well-defined natural frequency, even when stimulated by turbulent winds. Treating single stalks as resonant cantilevers permits the use of standard engineering methods to determine their elastic properties. Armed with these values, the application of similarity analysis to the equation of motion of a single stalk leads to criteria for aeroelastic modelling of wheat plants in the wind tunnel. A representative value for the spacing of stalks in a small section of model wheat field was calculated by referring to published data on momentum absorption in a variety of real and model canopies. Preliminary measurements of first and second moments of velocity in the model appear to confirm the importance of including elastic properties in wind tunnel simulations of airflow in flexible crops.