QUANTIFYING SHAPE OF STAR-LIKE OBJECTS USING SHAPE CURVES AND A NEW COMPACTNESS MEASURE

Published

March 3, 2021

Author(s)

Edward Garboczi, Gopal Mulukutla, Emese Hadnagy, Matthew Fearon

Abstract

Shape is an important indicator of the physical and chemical behavior of natural and engineered particulate materials (e.g., sediment, sand, rock, volcanic ash). It directly or indirectly affects numerous microscopic and macroscopic geologic, environmental and engineering processes. Due to the complex, highly irregular shapes found in particulate materials, there is a perennial need for quantitative shape descriptions. We developed a new characterization method (shape curve analysis) and a new quantitative measure (compactness, not the topological mathematical definition) by applying a fundamental principle that the geometric anisotropy of an object is a unique signature of its internal spatial distribution of matter. We show that this method is applicable to "star-like" particles, a broad mathematical definition of shape fulfilled by most natural and engineered particulate materials. This new method and measure are designed to be mathematically intermediate between simple parameters like sphericity and full 3D shape descriptions. For a "star-like" object discretized as a polyhedron made of surface planar elements, each shape curve describes the distribution of elemental surface area or volume. Using several thousand regular and highly irregular 3-D shape representations, built from model or real particles, we demonstrate that shape curves accurately encode geometric anisotropy by mapping surface area and volume information onto a pair of dimensionless 2-D curves. Each shape curve produces an intrinsic property (length of shape curve) that is used to describe a new definition of compactness, a property shown to be independent of translation, rotation, and scale. Compactness exhibits unique values for distinct shapes and is insensitive to changes in measurement resolution and noise. With increasing ability to rapidly capture digital representations of highly irregular 3-D shapes, this work provides a new quantitative shape measure for direct comparison of

Citation

Earth Systems Research Center, https://scholars.unh.edu/esrc/215

Pub Type

Others

Keywords

shape parameters, particles, powders, compactness, shape curves, spherical harmonics

Citation

Garboczi, E. , Mulukutla, G. , Hadnagy, E. and Fearon, M. (2021), QUANTIFYING SHAPE OF STAR-LIKE OBJECTS USING SHAPE CURVES AND A NEW COMPACTNESS MEASURE, Earth Systems Research Center, https://scholars.unh.edu/esrc/215 (Accessed April 27, 2024)