Voronoi-Delaunay analysis of voids in systems of nonspherical particles.

The Voronoi network is known to be a useful tool for the structural description of voids in the packings of spheres produced by computer simulations. In this article we extend the Voronoi-Delaunay analysis to packings of nonspherical convex objects. Main properties of the Voronoi network, which are known for systems of spheres, are valid for systems of any convex objects. A general numerical algorithm for calculation of the Voronoi network in three dimensions is proposed. It is based on the calculation of the trajectory of the imaginary empty sphere of variable size, moving inside a system (the Delaunay empty sphere method). Analysis of voids is presented for an ensemble of random straight lines and for a molecular dynamics model of liquid crystal. The spatial distribution of voids and a simple percolation analysis are obtained. The distributions of the bottleneck radii and the radii of spheres inscribed in the voids are calculated.