EXPLICIT BOUNDARY SOLUTIONS FOR ELLIPSOIDAL PARTICLE PACKING AND REACTION-DIFFUSION PROBLEMS

Moving boundary problems such as solidification, crack propagation, multi-body contact or shape optimal design represent an important class of engineering problems. Common to these problems are one or more moving interfaces or boundaries. One of the main challenges associated with boundary evolution is the difficulty that arises when the topology of the geometry changes. Other geometric issues such as distance to the boundary, projected point on the boundary and intersection between surfaces are also important and need to be efficiently solved. In general, the present thesis is concerned with the geometric arrangement and behavioral analysis of evolving parametric boundaries immersed in a domain. The first problem addressed in this thesis is the packing of ellipsoidal fillers in a regular domain and to estimate their effective physical behavior. Particle packing problem arises when one generates simulated microstructures of particulate composites. Such particulate composites used as thermal interface materials (TIMs) motivates this work. The collision detection and distance calculation between ellipsoids is much more difficult than other regular shapes such as spheres or polyhedra. While many existing methods address the spherical packing problems, few appear to achieve volume loading exceeding 60%. The packing of ellipsoidal particles is even more difficult than that of spherical particles due to the need to detect contact between the particles. In this thesis, an efficient and robust ultra-packing algorithm termed Modified Drop-Fall-Shake is developed. The algorithm is used to simulate the real mixing process when manufacturing TIMs with hundreds of thousands ellipsoidal particles. The effective thermal conductivity of the particulate system is evaluated using an algorithm based on Random Network Model. In problems where general free-form parametric surfaces (as opposed to the ellipsoidal fillers) need to be evolved inside a regular domain, the geometric distance from a point in the domain to the boundary is ...