X-ray tomography study of the random packing structure of ellipsoids

Abstract

We present an X-ray tomography study for the random packing of ellipsoids. The local structure displays short-range correlations. In addition to the contact number Z, we introduce ρ_shell, the average contact radius of curvature for contacting neighbors, as an additional parameter to characterize the local orientational geometry. In general, the local free volume w is affected by both Z and ρ_shell. We believe that the particle asphericity induces a polydispersity effect to influence the packing properties. A model is introduced which explicitly maps the ellipsoid packing onto a polydispersed sphere one, and it reproduces most of the experimental observations.