Dehydration of core/shell fruits.

Abstract

Dehydrated core/shell fruits, such as jujubes, raisins and plums, show very complex buckles and wrinkles on their exocarp. It is a challenging task to model such complicated patterns and their evolution in a virtual environment even for professional animators. This paper presents a unified physically-based approach to simulate the morphological transformation for the core/shell fruits in the dehydration process. A finite element method (FEM), which is based on the multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient into an elastic part and a dehydrated part, is adopted to model the morphological evolution. In the method, the dehydration pattern can be conveniently controlled through physically prescribed parameters according to the geometry and material of the real fruits. The effects of the parameters on the final dehydrated surface patterns are investigated and summarized in detail. Experiments on jujubes, wolfberries, raisins and plums are given, which demonstrate the efficacy of the method.