Anisotropy in electrical conductivity of films of aligned intersecting conducting rods.

Abstract

Numerical simulations by means of the Monte Carlo method have been performed to study the electrical properties of a two-dimensional composite filled with rodlike particles. The main goal was to study the effect of the alignment of such rods on the anisotropy of its electrical conductivity. A continuous model was used. In this model, the rods have zero-width (i.e., infinite aspect ratio) and they may intersect each other. To involve both the low conductive host matrix and highly conductive fillers (rods) in the consideration, a discretization algorithm based on the use of a supporting mesh was applied. The discretization is equivalent to the substitution of rods with the polyominoes. Once discretized, the Frank-Lobb algorithm was applied to evaluate the electrical conductivity. Our main findings are (i) the alignment of the rods essentially affects the electrical conductivity and its anisotropy, (ii) the discrete nature of computer simulations is crucial. For slightly disordered system, high electrical anisotropy was observed at small filler content, suggesting a method to enable the production of optically transparent and highly anisotropic conducting films.