A Method for Random Packing of Spheres with Application to Bonding Modeling in Powder Bed 3D Printing Process

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Matlab-based method for randomly packing spheres of various sizes into complex volumes, with an application to modeling particle bonding in powder bed 3D printing.

Contribution

It presents a flexible computational procedure for sphere packing with arbitrary size distributions and demonstrates its application to simulate particle bonding in additive manufacturing.

Findings

Successfully packed spheres in complex geometries.

Applied to model laser-heated particle bonding.

Flexible for different size distributions like Weibull and Gamma.

Abstract

A Matlab-based computational procedure is proposed to fill a given volume with spheres whose radii are randomly picked from any specified probability distribution supported by \verb|Matlab|. The general program sequence and examples of filling a unit cube, a parallelepiped, and a concave domain between two hemispherical surfaces, with spheres whose radii are drawn from the Weibull and Gamma distributions, are presented. A sample application to the numerical modeling of bond formation between particles heated by a laser beam in powder bed 3D printing process is considered.