Quantifying Void Ratio in Granular Materials Using Voronoi Tessellation

Abstract

The Voronoi technique was used to calculate the local void ratio distribution of granular materials. It was implemented in an application-oriented image processing and analysis algorithm capable of extracting object edges, separating adjacent particles, obtaining the centroid of each particle, generating Voronoi polygons, and calculating the local void ratio. Details of the algorithm capabilities and features are presented. Verification calculations included performing manual digitization of synthetic images using Oda's method and the Voronoi polygon system. The developed algorithm yielded very accurate measurements of the local void ratio distribution. Voronoi tessellation has the advantage, as compared with Oda's method, of offering a well-defined polygon generation criterion that can be implemented in an algorithm to automatically calculate the local void ratio of particulate materials.