Effects of Contact Force Model and Size Distribution on Microsized Granular Packing

Granular packing of microsized particles with different size distributions and contactforce models is studied using discrete element method (DEM). Three kinds of size distri-butions, monosized, uniform, and Gaussian, with mean diameter of 50, 60, and 70lm arestudied. Two aspects of microscale particle packing issues are addressed: one is the im-portance of van der Waals force when the particle size approaching to microscale, theother one is the structure variation caused by different contact force models. The resultsindicate that compared with contact force, the van der Waals force contributes very insig-nificantly to the final packing structure. The packing structures obtained using two differ-ent force models are similar to each other. The effects of particle size and its distributionon the packing structure are more significant than the force model.[DOI: 10.1115/1.4025969]Keywords: additive manufacturing, distinct element method, size distribution, granularmatter