Compaction and arching in tapped pentagon deposits

Abstract

We simulate the process of compaction under vertical tapping for a two-dimensional system of particles deposited in a rectangular box. The particles consist in regular pentagons and our main objective is to analyze the novel behavior recently found for the packing fraction as a function of the tapping strength applied to the system (Vidales et al. in Phys Rev E 77:051305, 2008). We will relate the behavior of the number and type of arches, mean coordination number and number and type of contacts to the peculiar packing density increase found for increasing tapping strength. Finally, we present results of an annealed tapping on our packings to compare the results to the constant tapping protocol. All our results are compared with the analogous simulations carried out on disks.