The effects of regularity on the geometrical properties of Voronoi tessellations

This study comprehensively quantifies the effects of regularity on the geometrical properties of a random three-dimensional Voronoi tessellation (VT), where regularity was defined as the ratio of the minimum seed distance to the seed distance of the correlated body-centred cubic lattice. A scheme to generate Voronoi tessellations with controlled regularity is proposed, which was used to simulate 10(6) cells for a series of regularities. The results were used to derive probability distributions for the properties of the tessellation, including faces and edges per cell, vertex and dihedral cell angles, cell areas and volumes, etc. An understanding of the relation between a simple, measurable parameter characterizing the degree of regularity of a Voronoi tessellation and its geometrical properties is essential in generating virtual microstructures that are statistically representative of reality; the statistical results are also relevant to all other applications involving random Voronoi tessellations. Finally, an application is presented of the proposed Voronoi tessellation generation scheme applied to micromechanical modelling of grain structures with defined regularities for crystal plasticity finite element analysis. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.