Determination of Orientation Distributions of Fillers Simulating Tobacco Shreds

In order to determine the orientation distribution of tobacco shreds in a compression vessel on the basis of a theory developed by Komori and Makishima, the number of intersections of fillers in a vessel for several variously orientated cross-sections was measured from a 3-D image constructed by the use of micro-focus X-ray computed tomography. To verify the independence of the orientation distributions of the length and the width directions of the shred, we tried to compare the orientation distributions of two types of filler. One was paper shred, which simulated tobacco shred. The other was extruded cellulose of a cylindrical shape with a size close to the shred, which was meant to be a reference material. In order to estimate the orientation distribution function directly from the experimental data, we have proposed a novel method assuming an affine transformation from the completely random distribution. The orientation distribution functions obtained replicated very closely the experimental results, and it was concluded that the proposed method successfully estimated the orientation distribution functions of both extruded cellulose filler and length direction of the paper shred from the experimental data, and that, since there was no significant difference in the degree of agreement between two types of filler, the orientation distributions along the length and the width directions of the shred are independent. This method, including the experimental procedure, would be applicable to any flexible elongated particle mass under uniaxial compression in a universal testing machine. It would be particularly useful to determine the actual initial and final orientations of the mass in the universal testing machine and to compare them with the presumed orientations.