Validity of Eshelby-stress-driven growth laws for plant tissues

Determine whether growth laws that adopt the Eshelby stress tensor as the driving force can reproduce the basic properties and growth phenomenology of plant living matter within morphoelastic continuum formulations.

Background

In deriving thermodynamic constraints, the authors show that the Eshelby stress naturally appears as a candidate driving force for growth via the Coleman–Noll procedure. While such stress-based laws are common in other biological contexts, the authors question their suitability for plant tissues, where wall yielding and remodeling are often modeled as passive, plastic-like processes with complex anisotropies and thresholds.

They explicitly state uncertainty about whether simple Eshelby-stress-based growth laws can capture basic plant mechanical behaviors, prompting a targeted open question on the validity of such laws in plant morphomechanics.