On the relationships between structural properties and packing density of uniform spheres

Abstract This paper aims to establish the relationships between microscopic and macroscopic properties for uniform sphere packings under gravity. The packings are generated by the discrete element method under different conditions with the packing density ranging from about 0.2 to 0.74. The microscopic properties are the structural properties commonly used, including coordination number and various topological and metric properties from the Voronoi-Delaunay tessellation. The results show that these properties can be correlated with packing density. The correlations can be used to estimate different structural properties which are otherwise difficult to obtain in practice.