The Phase Diagram for Percolating Free Surfaces in Disordered Assemblies of Faceted Grains

Abstract

Percolation in systems made up of randomly placed impermeable grains is often examined in the context of system spanning clusters of connected solids forming above a relatively low critical grain density ${\rho }_{c1}$ or networks of interstitial void volumes ceasing to exist above a signficantly higher threshold ${\rho }_{c2}$. In this work, we interpret these percolation transitions as, respectively, the low and high density boundaries of percolating exposed surfaces which either ensheath clusters of impermeable particles or line tunnel-like voids. Moreover, we find in the thermodynamic limit exposed surfaces are either sheaths or tunnels with a second order phase transition from the former to the latter at a density threshold ${\rho }_{c\ast }$ intermediate between ${\rho }_{c1}$ and ${\rho }_{c2}$. We calculate critical inclusion densities with a new method which identifies exposed free surfaces in a geometrically exact manner with a computational cost scaling only linearly in the system volume. We obtain ${\rho }_{c1}$, ${\rho }_{c2}$, and ${\rho }_{c\ast }$ for a variety of grain geometries, including each of the Platonic solids, truncated icosahedra, and structurally disordered inclusions formed from cubes subject to a random sequence of slicing planes. In the case of the latter, we find a limiting value of $5\%$ for the critical porosity at the void percolation threshold as the number of sustained slices per cube becomes large.

6 pages, 5 figures