Resumen
Covering spheroids (ellipsoids of revolution) by different spheres is studied. The research is motivated by packing non-spherical particles arising in natural sciences, e.g., in powder technologies. The concept of an e
e
-cover is introduced as an outer multi-spherical approximation of the spheroid with the proximity e
e
. A fast heuristic algorithm is proposed to construct an optimized e
e
-cover giving a reasonable balance between the value of the proximity parameter e
e
and the number of spheres used. Computational results are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.