ABSTRACT
Random ballistic deposition (RBD) is a well-known method for the geometrical construction of random packings of hard particles (Jullien et al. 1993).The particles are allowed to fall sequentially along randomly positioned vertical lines over a horizontal substrate. Upon contact with the substrate or the first (already deposited) particle, the particle either sticks or is further moved to a more favorable position according to a relaxation rule. Random deposition of particles can also be simulated by means of dynamic methods, such as the contact dynamics (CD) method (Moreau 1994; Radjai et al. 1996), in the spirit of a real experiment where the grains are poured into a box. Although dynamic simulations require substantially more computation time, it is important to compare the structural properties of a RBD packing with an “equivalent” CD packing where real particle dynamics is accounted for.
