An Optimized Covering Spheroids by Spheres

Abstract

Covering spheroids (ellipsoids of revolution) by different spheres is studied. The research is motivated by packing non-spherical particles arising in natural sciences, e.g., in powder technologies. The concept of an ε -cover is introduced as an outer multi-spherical approximation of the spheroid with the proximity ε . A fast heuristic algorithm is proposed to construct an optimized ε -cover giving a reasonable balance between the value of the proximity parameter ε and the number of spheres used. Computational results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.

Keywords

• covering
• spheroids
• spheres
• mathematical model
• nonlinear optimization