Presenter: Josh Augenstein
Authors: Joshua Augenstein, Nathan Crane
Faculty Advisor: Nathan Crane
Institution: Brigham Young University
Plants and trees transport fluids remarkable distances driven by evaporation and osmosis. This capability could prove useful in engineering applications; however, there is a lack in understanding of the factors that drive an efficient synthetic system and the sensitivity these systems have to their environment. Previous research has pushed the distance to which we can emulate this phenomenon, achieving heights as much as 3 meters tall in controlled environments. These experiments are based on the design of vascular tissues and leaves within plants using water reservoirs, tubing, and ceramic discs to copy the process of transport and transpiration. However, these tests showed extremely slow rates of flow, used rather expensive materials, and focused solely on maximizing height. Within this project, we explored how a simple synthetic plant system passively transports water and the factors that most impact mass flow rate. To study this, the mass flow rate was measured for different numbers of transport tubes, temperature, tube length, and wind conditions. Performance was further observed using infrared temperature observation and water coloring to track movement and evaporation spatially. Through this study, we found that not only were these synthetic systems successful in consistent fluid transport, but usually ran to reservoir depletion. Evaporation was consistent at around 3-4 mg/min for varying numbers of tubes in still, room temperature air. Exposing the synthetic plant systems to airflow or higher temperature environments dramatically increased the transpiration rate (up to 30 mg/min). With this new understanding and data, further experiments may be implemented to design systems of higher efficiency and ability as well as open the doors to a world of new applications for passive fluid transport such as vertical greenhouses, machine cooling, or environmental monitoring.