The porous compacts of non-spherical particles are frequently used in energy storage devices and other advanced applications. In the present work, the microstructures of compacts of monodisperse cylindrical particles are investigated. The cylindrical particles with various aspect ratios are generated using superquadrics, and the discrete element method was adopted to simulate the compacts formed under gravity deposition of randomly oriented particles. The Voronoi tessellation is then used to quantify the porous microstructure of compacts. With one exception, the median reduced free volume of Voronoi cells increases, and the median local packing density decreases for compacts composed of cylinders with a high aspect ratio, indicating a loose packing of long cylinders due to their mechanical interlocking during compaction. The obtained data are needed for further optimization of compact porous microstructure to improve the transport properties of compacts of non-spherical particles.

Particle packing plays an essential role in industry and chemical engineering. In this work, the discrete element method is used to generate the cylindrical particles and densify the binary cylindrical particle mixtures under the poured packing conditions. The influences of the aspect ratio and volume fraction of particles on the packing structure are measured by planar packing fraction. The Voronoi tessellation is used to quantify the porous structure of packing. The cumulative distribution functions of local packing fractions and the probability distributions of the reduced free volume of Voronoi cells are calculated to describe the local packing characteristics of binary mixtures with different volume fractions. As a result, it is observed that particles with larger aspect ratios in the binary mixture tend to orient randomly, and the particles with smaller aspect ratios have a preferentially horizontal orientation. Results also show that the less dense packings are obtained for mixtures with particles of higher aspect ratios and mixtures with a larger fraction of elongated cylindrical particles.