Analysis of the packing structure of wet spheres by Voronoi–Delaunay tessellation

The structure of a packing of narrowly sized wet spheres with packing density 0.435 is analysed against the well-established random close packing with packing density 0.64 by means of the Voronoi and Delaunay tessellation. The topological and metric properties of Voronoi polyhedra, such as the number of faces, perimeter, area and volume of a polyhedron, the number of edges, perimeter and area of a polyhedron face, have been quantified. Compared to the well established random close packing, the distributions become wider and more asymmetric with a long tail at the higher values. The volume and sphericity of each Delaunay cell have also been quantified. Their distributions are shown to be wider and more asymmetric than those for the random close packing, but the peaks are almost the same. For the wet particle packing, the correlations between Voronoi polyhedron size and shape and between Delaunay cell size and shape are more scattered. The topological and metric results are also shown to be consistent with those obtained for the packing of fine particles, although the dominant forces in forming a packing differ. The results should be useful to the quantitative understanding of the structure of loosely packed particles.