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Stochastic particle packing with specified granulometry and porosity

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Abstract

This work presents a technique for particle size generation and placement in arbitrary closed domains. Its main application is the simulation of granular media described by disks. Particle size generation is based on the statistical analysis of granulometric curves which are used as empirical cumulative distribution functions to sample from mixtures of uniform distributions. The desired porosity is attained by selecting a certain number of particles, and their placement is performed by a stochastic point process. We present an application analyzing different types of sand and clay, where we model the grain size with the gamma, lognormal, Weibull and hyperbolic distributions. The parameters from the resulting best fit are used to generate samples from the theoretical distribution, which are used for filling a finite-size area with non-overlapping disks deployed by a Simple Sequential Inhibition stochastic point process. Such filled areas are relevant as plausible inputs for assessing Discrete Element Method and similar techniques.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratório de Computação Científica e Visualização, Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Campus A. C. Simões, Av. Lourival Melo Mota, s/n, Tabuleiro do Martins, Maceió, AL, 57072-970, Brazil

    Alejandro C. Frery, Viviane Carrilho Leão Ramos, Adeildo Soares Ramos Jr & William Wagner Matos Lira

  2. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Lorena Rivarola-Duarte

Authors
  1. Alejandro C. Frery
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  2. Lorena Rivarola-Duarte
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  3. Viviane Carrilho Leão Ramos
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  4. Adeildo Soares Ramos Jr
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  5. William Wagner Matos Lira
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Correspondence to Alejandro C. Frery.

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Frery, A.C., Rivarola-Duarte, L., Ramos, V.C.L. et al. Stochastic particle packing with specified granulometry and porosity. Granular Matter 14, 27–36 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-011-0300-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10035-011-0300-5

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