An Optimized Covering Spheroids by Spheres
Covering spheroids (ellipsoids of revolution) by different spheres is studied. The research is motivated by packing non spherical particles arising in natural sciences, e.g. in powder technologies. The concept of an e cover is introduced as an outer multi spherical approximation of the spheroid with the proximity e. A fast heuristic algorithm is proposed to construct an optimized e cover giving a reasonable balance between the value of the proximity parameter e and the number of spheres used. Computational results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.