What is the principle behind vibration packing?

Jennifer Murphy

Jennifer Murphy

@jennifer-murphy-CyNi39 • Oct 26, 2024
When a company ships containers of things like peanuts, cheerios, nuts & bolts, or any collection of "particles" of different sizes and, possibly, shapes, the container will appear less full when it arrives than when it was shipped. This is because the jostling that occurs during shipping and handling causes the particles to rearrange themselves in more and more compact ways.

The containers never become less compact. This is because the more compact arrangements are more stable, so they resist further changes. If the particles differ in size, the smaller particles tend to settle to the bottom because they can fit into the spaces between the larger particles.

Is there a technical term for this?

Homeostasis? Entropy?

PS: Did I post this in the right place or should it have gone in civil engineering?
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  • Ramani Aswath

    Ramani Aswath

    @ramani-VR4O43 • Mar 19, 2015

    In the early sixties I was involved in a lot of R&D on packing of particles. One PhD project was on maximizing grain storage. Grains have a huge range of geometries and sizes. It has ramifications in many areas of engineering. This gives some more background info: #-Link-Snipped-#
  • Jennifer Murphy

    Jennifer Murphy

    @jennifer-murphy-CyNi39 • Mar 19, 2015

    The sixties? What are you, a hippie? No, I guess not, if you were a PhD student at Princeton. A relative got married near Princeton a few years ago, so I had a chance to drive through the campus. Very beautiful. My late father-in-law graduated there in the 40s (I think).

    Cool report. I wish I could have gotten in on the M&M study. We might have run out of particles.

    But is there an engineering term for the phenomenon whereby irregular particles always become more densely packed. They never become less densely packed.

    In psychology (and biology, I think), there is the term "homeostasis" which says that unstable systems tend to change (because they are unstable) and stable systems tend not to change (because they are stable). So over time, systems tend to become more and more stable (static) -- they tend toward stasis. I don't know if that term works for inert (non-living) systems, like M&Ms.
  • Ramani Aswath

    Ramani Aswath

    @ramani-VR4O43 • Mar 19, 2015

    Jennifer Murphy
    if you were a PhD student at Princeton
    I used to teach in the Chem Eng department at the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras in the early sixties. Homeostasis is the mechanism by which a stable internal system (of variables like temperature, acid/base balance) is automatically maintained in spite of external changes in organisms. The term now includes other non biological systems.
    To my knowledge there is no engineering term for this. We used to refer to it as packing of particles.
  • Jennifer Murphy

    Jennifer Murphy

    @jennifer-murphy-CyNi39 • Mar 19, 2015

    OK, thanks