posted on 2017-07-20, 15:13authored byDavide Vettori, Vladimir Nikora
Interactions between water flow and aquatic vegetation strongly depend on morphological and biomechanical characteristics of vegetation. Although any physical or numerical model that aims to replicate flow-vegetation interactions requires these characteristics, information on morphology and mechanics of vegetation living in coastal waters remains insufficient. The present study investigates the mechanical properties of blades of Saccharina latissima, a seaweed species spread along the shores of the UK and North East Atlantic. More than 50 seaweed samples with lengths spanning from 150 mm to 650 mm were collected from Loch Fyne (Scotland) and tested. Seaweed blades had a natural ‘stretched droplet’ shape with bullations in the central fascia and ruffled edges in the area close to the stipe. Their morphological features showed high variability for samples longer than 400 mm. The blades were almost neutrally buoyant, their material was found to be very flexible and ductile, being stiffer in longer blades. The laboratory tests showed that estimates of tensile Young's modulus appeared to be similar to bending Young's modulus suggesting a reasonable degree of isotropy in studied seaweed tissues.
Funding
The work described in this publication was conducted during the Ph.D. study of D. Vettori, funded by the Northern Research Partnership and the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Geography and Environment
Published in
Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science
Volume
196
Pages
1 - 9
Citation
VETTORI, D. and NIKORA, V., 2017. Morphological and mechanical properties of blades of Saccharina latissima. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, 196, pp. 1-9.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publication date
2017
Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecss.2017.06.033