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Published February 13, 2004 | public
Journal Article

Improving the Density of Jammed Disordered Packings Using Ellipsoids

Abstract

Packing problems, such as how densely objects can fill a volume, are among the most ancient and persistent problems in mathematics and science. For equal spheres, it has only recently been proved that the face-centered cubic lattice has the highest possible packing fraction φ = π/√18 ≈ 0.74. It is also well known that certain random (amorphous) jammed packings have φ ≈ 0.64. Here, we show experimentally and with a new simulation algorithm that ellipsoids can randomly pack more densely—up to φ = 0.68 to 0.71 for spheroids with an aspect ratio close to that of M&M's Candies—and even approach φ ≈ 0.74 for ellipsoids with other aspect ratios. We suggest that the higher density is directly related to the higher number of degrees of freedom per particle and thus the larger number of particle contacts required to mechanically stabilize the packing. We measured the number of contacts per particle Z ≈ 10 for our spheroids, as compared to Z ≈ 6 for spheres. Our results have implications for a broad range of scientific disciplines, including the properties of granular media and ceramics, glass formation, and discrete geometry.

Additional Information

© 2004 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received for publication October 27, 2003. Accepted for publication December 9, 2003. Supported by American Chemical Society PRF grant 36967-AC9 (S.T., A.D., F.H.S.), NASA grant NAG3-1762 (P.M.C.), and NSF grants DMR-0213706 (S.T., P.M.C., A.D., F.H.S.), DMS-0312067 (S.T., A.D., F.H.S.), and DMS-0209595 (R.C.).

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023