Generating a contact network from a 3D sphere packing

Begin with a few package imports:

[1]:

from IPython.display import HTML

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from packing_utils import *
from plot_imports import *

Simulation

Generate a packing of 128 bidisperse spheres in 3D:

[2]:

n = 128
seed = 0
dim = 3

net = Packing(n, dim=dim, seed=seed)
net.generate()

progress: 100%|###############################################################| 1000.00/1000.00 [00:12<00:00]

Visualization of the 3D packings requires the povray ray-tracing software to be installed, and makes use of the vapory package in Python.

[3]:

%matplotlib notebook

net.plot(spheres=True, edges=False)

View only the contact network:

[4]:

net.plot(spheres=False)

An animation of the packing simulation can be generated and visualized with the following code cell:

[ ]:

%matplotlib inline

ani = net.animate(spheres=True, edges=False)
HTML(ani.to_html5_video())

Save the network to a file. The text file can be used to initialize a graph for physical learning with elastic networks.

[6]:

net.save('packing_3d.txt')