An Optimized Covering Spheroids by Spheres

Covering spheroids (ellipsoids of revolution) by different spheres is studied. The research is motivated by packing non-spherical particles arising in natural sciences, e.g., in powder technologies. The concept of an ε -cover is introduced as an outer multi-spherical approximation of the spheroid wi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pankratov, Alexander, Romanova, Tatiana, Litvinchev, Igor, Marmolejo Saucedo, José Antonio
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.uanl.mx/23634/1/23634.pdf
Description
Summary:Covering spheroids (ellipsoids of revolution) by different spheres is studied. The research is motivated by packing non-spherical particles arising in natural sciences, e.g., in powder technologies. The concept of an ε -cover is introduced as an outer multi-spherical approximation of the spheroid with the proximity ε . A fast heuristic algorithm is proposed to construct an optimized ε -cover giving a reasonable balance between the value of the proximity parameter ε and the number of spheres used. Computational results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.