SURFACES OF HARD-SPHERE SYSTEMS

<p>In various situations surfaces appear that are formed by systems of hard spheres. Examples are porous layers as surfaces of sand heaps and biofilms or fracture surfaces of concrete. The present paper considers models where a statistically homogeneous system of hard spheres with random radii...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Image Analysis and Stereology
Main Author: Dietrich Stoyan
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Slovenian Society for Stereology and Quantitative Image Analysis 2014-07-01
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.ias-iss.org/ojs/IAS/article/view/1134
Description
Summary:<p>In various situations surfaces appear that are formed by systems of hard spheres. Examples are porous layers as surfaces of sand heaps and biofilms or fracture surfaces of concrete. The present paper considers models where a statistically homogeneous system of hard spheres with random radii is intersected by a plane and the surface is formed by the spheres with centers close to this plane. Formulae are derived for various characteristics of such surfaces: for the porosity profile, i.e. the local porosity in dependence on the distance from the section plane and for the geometry of the sphere caps that look above the section plane.</p><p>It turns out that these characteristics only depend on the first-order characteristics of the sphere system, its sphere density and the sphere radius distribution.</p><p>Comparison with empirically studied biofilms shows that the model is realistic.</p>
ISSN:1580-3139
1854-5165