Investigation of Shape for the Baltic Sea Coastal Area Sand Particles Using Spherical Harmonics

Abstract This paper examines sand particles from the southern part of the Lithuanian mainland area of the Baltic Sea. The constant movement caused by waves in the coastal zone results in creating smooth, near-spherical particle shapes. Such shapes are suitable for modeling by spherical harmonics (SH). Therefore, the paper presents the methodology of spherical harmonics expansion and demonstrates the suitability of SH model to represent the shape of a sand particle. The results presented in this paper demonstrated that the required accuracy can be retained by a smaller number of SH functions, and these SH models of particles can be implemented in DEM simulations to model the behavior of geomaterials.