A Method for Random Packing of Spheres with Application to Bonding Modeling in Powder Bed 3D Printing Process

Abstract: A Matlab-based computational procedure is proposed to fill a given volume with spheres whose radii are randomly picked from any specified probability distribution supported by \verb|Matlab|. The general program sequence and examples of filling a unit cube, a parallelepiped, and a concave domain between two hemispherical surfaces, with spheres whose radii are drawn from the Weibull and Gamma distributions, are presented. A sample application to the numerical modeling of bond formation between particles heated by a laser beam in powder bed 3D printing process is considered.