Sphere clump generation and trajectory comparison for real particles

An automatic method for generating sphere clump models of real particles is presented. This is achieved by a process that seeks to optimise the surface correspondence between the sphere clump and a triangular mesh model of the particle. We explore the effect of the number of spheres in the sphere clump model and the extent to which realistic trajectories can be reproduced with DEM simulation. Particle trajectories of actual interactions are extracted from high-speed video sequences using a novel pose estimation technique. Comparisons of sphere clump trajectories with particle trajectories demonstrates that improved particle shape representation with multiple spheres does not necessarily imply better simulation accuracy, unless the interacting particles exhibit highly irregular mass distributions.