Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences
Volume 3 (1999), Issue 2, Pages 171-187
doi:10.1155/S1173912699000103
On the heat impulse method for deducing sap flow
Department of Mathematics, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, China
Copyright © 1999 Ron Gribben. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Speed of sap flow in plants and trees is of interest to botanists and environmentalists
because of its connection with the rate of utilisation of nutrients in the soil. An established method
uses the transport of heat where an impulsive heat source is introduced along a radial line by a
probe in the trunk sapwood. The temperature is monitored, upstream and downstream, and, by
solving the heat flow equation in the moving fluid, the sap velocity may be deduced indirectly
under some simplifying assumptions which chiefly render the method most useful when applied to
trees of relatively large diameter. Transform methods are used to obtain the appropriate threedimensional
time-dependent solution in explicit form and values for the resulting sap velocity are
compared with the existing two-dimensional theory.