Novel use of the cell-linked list algorithm to reduce computational time in meshfree based numerical models for plant cell drying

Dried plant food products are very popular in the consumer market today, having numerous advantages such as increased shelf life, ease of storage and transportation due to less weight and volume. During drying, complex changes of different physical properties of the food material occur due to heat and mass transfer phenomena. In order to model these drying mechanisms of plant cells, numerical models based on meshfree methods have been used recently, which have the capability of uniquely modelling large deformations as a result of moisture reduction of cells and tissues. This paper presents a numerical treatment, which can reduce the computation time of such state of the art meshfree particle based plant cell models by about 20%, without compromising the accuracy of the computations. The proposed treatment focuses on the highest time consuming component: Nearest Neighbour Particle Searching (NNPS) algorithm used in the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) based cell fluid element of the meshfree model. For this purpose, the Cell-Linked List Algorithm (CLLA) was used instead of the all-pair searching approach used in meshfree based state of the art plant cell models. Simulations were conducted for cell deformations at different drying states and a good agreement was observed against published experimental and numerical results, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings of this study will be useful for efficient simulation of plant cells and tissue in micro, macro and multiscale studies.