Concept of the ‘equivalent packing diameter’
According to Yu & Zou [1998], the initial packing density of irregular particles depends
on the shape and the size of the grains and the applied compaction energy. Yu et al.
[1993] proposed the concept of the ‘equivalent packing diameter’ to include nonspherical
particles into numerical simulations. Their approach was to relate the shape
and the dimension of a non-spherical particle to the diameter of a fictitious sphere
having an equivalent diameter that does not result in a change of the packing density.
when combined with a spherical grain of the same diameter. The following equations
were proposed to calculate the equivalent packing diameter: