Modelling of flexible aquatic plants from silicone syntactic foams

In experiments with vegetated flows, natural plants are often represented by artificial surrogates, which eliminate effects of plants physiology to easy fit the experimental set-ups. Using surrogates of flexible aquatic plants, the buoyancy and rigidity are supposed to match those in tissues of the natural plants. This paper introduces a new technique for manufacturing composite surrogates from silicon syntactic foams and reports on laboratory tests, which illustrate that such surrogates respond to flow similarly to the natural plants. Practical applications are illustrated by examples from recent field-based experiments.