Release Time:2019-03-13  Hits:

Indexed by: Journal Article

Date of Publication: 2019-01-01

Journal: KSCE JOURNAL OF CIVIL ENGINEERING

Included Journals: Scopus、SCIE

Volume: 23

Issue: 1

Page Number: 120-129

ISSN: 1226-7988

Key Words: non-spherical particle; nonlinear optimization; minimal bounding box; shape factors; PFC3D

Abstract: The angularity of particles has important effects on the mechanical properties of asphalt mixture and other granular materials. To simulate these effects, the glue-sphere method was usually used to create an arbitrary polyhedron particle. Unlike other studies, this paper aims to efficiently fill a polyhedron with as few spheres as possible through optimization technology in order to reduce the cost of calculation during mixture simulation. Four contents are mainly discussed here: a) how to produce non-spherical aggregates and control their sizes with the minimal bounding box; b) how to fill convex non-spherical particles with the fewest balls as possible using the constrained nonlinear optimization method; c) how to compute the typical shape factors of these particles; and d) how the control parameters affect the filling effect. The algorithm for this study was programmed by MATLAB software and was proven to have better filling performance and less computational cost compared to other methods.