  The recently developed void expansion method (VEM) allows for an efficient
generation of porous packings of spherical particles over a wide range of
volume fractions. The method is based on a random placement of the structural
particles under addition of much smaller "void-particles" whose radii are
repeatedly increased during the void expansion. Thereby, they rearrange the
structural particles until formation of a dense particle packing and introduce
local heterogeneities in the structure. In this paper, microstructures with
volume fractions between 0.4 and 0.6 produced by VEM are analyzed with respect
to their degree of heterogeneity (DOH). In particular, the influence of the
void- to structural particle number ratio, which constitutes a principal
VEM-parameter, on the DOH is studied. The DOH is quantified using the pore size
distribution, the Voronoi volume distribution and the density-fluctuation
method in conjunction with fit functions or integral measures. This analysis
has revealed that for volume fractions between 0.4 and 0.55 the void-particle
number allows for a quasi-continuous adjustment of the DOH. Additionally, the
DOH-range of VEM-generated microstructures with a volume fraction of 0.4 is
compared to the range covered by microstructures generated using previous
Brownian dynamics simulations, which represent the structure of coagulated
colloidal suspensions. Both sets of microstructures cover similarly broad and
overlapping DOH-ranges, which allows concluding that VEM is an efficient method
to stochastically reproduce colloidal microstructures with varying DOH.
