Artificial Sphere Clusters Transported on a Conveyor Belt Simulated by a Discrete Element Method

This data set comprises sphere clusters that model particles of construction and demolition waste consisting of brick and sand lime brick while they were transported on a conveyor belt. The motion behavior of the sphere clusters was obtained by a discrete element method (DEM) model of the small-scale optical belt sorter Tablesort.

The files contain mid-points, radii, and classes of spheres that build sphere clusters, with each cluster modeling a
particle. Input images are generated by rendering the sphere clusters in the camera field of view of the simulated area-scan camera. The particles have diameters from 4 to 8 mm. The simulated mass flows were 70 g per s for sand-lime brick and 30 g per s for brick. The belt velocity is approximately 1.1 m per s. Data is recorded at 2000 fps and covers a simulated time period of 120 s.

A detailed description of the DEM model can be found in

Albert Bauer, Georg Maier, Marcel Reith-Braun, Harald Kruggel-Emden, Florian Pfaff, Robin Gruna, Uwe Hanebeck, Thomas Längle,
Towards a Feed Material Adaptive Optical Belt Sorter: A Simulation Study Utilizing a DEM-CFD Approach, Powder Technology, October 2022.

 A thorough description of the Tablesort system can be found in

Georg Maier, Florian Pfaff, Christoph Pieper, Robin Gruna, Benjamin Noack, Harald Kruggel-Emden, Thomas Längle, Uwe D. Hanebeck, Jürgen Beyerer,
Experimental Evaluation of a Novel Sensor-Based Sorting Approach Featuring Predictive Real-Time Multiobject Tracking,
Transactions on Industrial Electronics, February 2020.

See also the project website.

To this date, publications that used this data include

Marcel Reith-Braun, Albert Bauer, Maximilian Staab, Florian Pfaff, Georg Maier, Robin Gruna, Thomas Längle, Jürgen Beyerer, Harald Kruggel-Emden, and Uwe D. Hanebeck,
GridSort: Image-based Optical Bulk Material Sorting Using Convolutional LSTMs,
22nd IFAC World Congress, Yokohama, Japan, July 2023.

The used CSV format uses semicolons as separators. There is no header. The first three columns correspond to the x-, y-, and z-coordinate of each sphere in meters, with increasing x-coordinate in the transport direction. The fourth column contains the radii in meters, the fifth column the particle class (2 for sand-lime brick and 1 for brick), and the sixth column the particle ids to which the spheres belong. The file name encodes the simulated time in steps of 0.5 ms. Each file contains as many rows as spheres are visible in the respective time step. The field of view of the simulated camera is 0.442 m - 0642 m in the x-direction and 0.005 m - 0.145 m in the y-direction.

Acknowledgment

The IGF project 20354 N of the research association Forschungs-Gesellschaft Verfahrens-Technik e.V. (GVT) was supported via the AiF in a program to promote the Industrial Community Research and Development (IGF) by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action on the basis of a resolution of the German Bundestag.