A RELATION FOR THE VOID FRACTION OF RANDOMLY PACKED PARTICLE BEDS

The void fractions of loosely packed and tapped beds of particles of c ontinuous size distributions are correlated by means of a proposed new semi-empirical relation. In this relation four parameters describing the following particle properties are included: (i) mean particle size , (ii) spread of the particle size distribution, (iii) particle densit y and (iv) particle shape. The adjustable constants in the relation we re optimised using experimental void fractions and particle characteri stics for a wide variety of powders mainly gathered from the published literature. The optimised relation correlated the loosely packed and tapped bed void fractions with correlation coefficients of 0.955 and 0 .973, respectively, the correlation thus removing virtually all the sc atter in the original data. A discussion is provided.