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.

中文翻译：

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使用有机硅复合泡沫对柔性水生植物进行建模

在植物流实验中，天然植物通常由人工替代物代表，这消除了植物生理学的影响，以方便地适应实验装置。使用柔性水生植物的替代品，浮力和刚度应该与天然植物的组织相匹配。本文介绍了一种用硅复合泡沫制造复合代用品的新技术，并报告了实验室测试报告，表明此类代用品对流动的反应与天然植物相似。最近基于现场的实验中的示例说明了实际应用。