Wadell’s ‘true’ Sphericity is a traditional 3D particle geometry descriptor that quantifies the shape by comparing the particle’s surface area to the surface area of a sphere having the same volume as the particle. Despite the simplicity of definition and the capability to characterize the 3D shape, the true Sphericity has not been employed in the engineering practice due to the technical difficulty associated with the measurement of particle surface area. The recent advance in optical geo-characterization using 3D scanner has facilitated the surface area measurement, but which is still time-consuming and requires high computational cost to scan many particles to obtain a statistically reliable shape distribution. This paper introduces a new framework that can quickly estimate the particles’ true Sphericity with a minimal effort of 3D scanning. This approach leverages the relation between the particle surface-area-to-volume ratio (A/V) and volume (V) that can be approximated by a ‘power law’, which serves as the key information to estimate the 3D Sphericity by measuring the volume only. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of this new approach on a set of coarse aggregate.

Wadell的“真实”球度是一种传统的3D粒子几何描述符，它通过将粒子的表面积与具有与粒子相同体积的球体的表面积进行比较来量化形状。尽管定义简单，并且具有表征3D形状的能力，但由于与颗粒表面积测量相关的技术难度，真正的球形性尚未在工程实践中使用。使用3D扫描仪进行光学地理表征的最新进展促进了表面积测量，但是这仍然很耗时，并且需要高昂的计算成本才能扫描许多颗粒以获得统计上可靠的形状分布。本文介绍了一个新的框架，该框架可以以最少的3D扫描速度快速估算粒子的真实球形度。这种方法利用了可以通过“幂定律”近似的颗粒表面积与体积之比（A / V）与体积（V）之间的关系，该关系是通过测量来估算3D球形度的关键信息仅音量。本文证明了在一组粗骨料上采用这种新方法的可行性。