Numerical simulation demonstrates fractal substructure formation in settling nanopowder agglomerates, indicating universal loose-packing behavior across fragmentation scales.
The structural evolution of a nanopowder by repeated dispersion and settling can lead to characteristic fractal substructures. This is shown by numerical simulations of a two-dimensional model agglomerate of adhesive rigid particles. The agglomerate is cut into fragments of a characteristic size l, which then are settling under gravity. Repeating this procedure converges to a loosely packed structure, the properties of which are investigated: (a) The final packing density is independent of the initialization, (b) the short-range correlation function is independent of the fragment size, (c) the structure is fractal up to the fragmentation scale l with a fractal dimension close to 1.7, and (d) the relaxation time increases linearly with l.
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Schwager et al. (2008) studied this question.
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