Simulation study of the electrical tunneling network conductivity of suspensions of hard spherocylinders

Abstract

Using Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the electrical conductivity of networks of hard rods as a function of the volume fraction for two tunneling conductance models. For a simple, orientationally independent tunneling model, we observe non-monotonic behaviour of the bulk conductivity as a function of volume fraction at the isotropic-nematic transition. However, this effect is lost if one allows for anisotropic tunneling. We also compute the mesh number of the Kirchhoff network, which turns out to be a simple alternative to the computationally expensive conductivity of large systems in order to get a qualitative estimate.

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Unusual geometric percolation of hard nanorods in the uniaxial nematic liquid crystalline phase
• Shape, connectedness percolation and electrical conductivity of clusters in suspensions of hard platelets
• Geometric percolation of hard nanorods: the interplay of spontaneous and externally induced uniaxial particle alignment