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drawlins1-Visitor
1-Visitor
Mar 31, 2017 4:09 PM UTC
Question

Marbles in a bottle

What is the best way to assemble marbles of a given size into a container and determine how deep 100 marbles will fill it.  I have a nominal marble diameter, minimum diameter and a maximum diameter and need to measure all 3.  Any ideas would be appreciated.  Thanks in advance for ideas.

    6 replies

    Dale_Rosema
    Dale_Rosema23-Emerald IV
    23-Emerald IV
    Mar 31, 2017 5:33 PM UTC

    Makes me think of the old chemistry, BCC & CCP (Body Centered Cubic & Cubic Closest Pack).

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    drawlins1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    Mar 31, 2017 6:05 PM UTC

    I can attach the .prt files if I can figure out how to do it?

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    dschenken2-Explorer
    2-Explorer
    Mar 31, 2017 6:30 PM UTC

    Buy 100 marbles and make a scaled model of the container to match the ratio to the marble sizes.

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    psobejko1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    Apr 1, 2017 12:17 AM UTC

    Try using Sketchup or Blender...

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    canderson-21-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    Apr 2, 2017 1:34 AM UTC

    I don't know how to do this in Creo, Don. If you had a specific container you could manually assemble each marble with tangent constraints, but I don't think this is what you are looking for. I imagine you are after an automated solution. This is a complex contact problem that Creo is not ideally suited for. You could solve this relatively easily using a physics engine called Kangaroo. Kangaroo is a plugin for Grasshopper that is a plugin for Rhino. It understands contact and gravity. Kangaroo - Grasshopper

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    drawlins1-VisitorAuthor
    1-Visitor
    Apr 3, 2017 3:17 PM UTC

    Thanks to everyone for the suggestions.  I think I've got the solution figured out using water and marble fill then solving for displacement to get the percentage of marble fill.  Then using this with volume measurements in Creo to come up with the fill level at nominal, minimum and maximum marble size.

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