Application of epidemic models to phase transitions

Abstract

The Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) and Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) models describe the spread of epidemics in a society. In the typical case, the ratio of the susceptible individuals fall from a value S 0 close to 1 to a final value Sf , while the ratio of recovered individuals rise from 0 to Rf = 1 − Sf . The sharp passage from the level zero to the level Rf allows also the modeling of phase transitions by the number of “recovered” individuals R(t) of the SIR or SEIR model. In this article, we model the sol–gel transition for polyacrylamide–sodium alginate (SA) composite with different concentrations of SA as SIR and SEIR dynamical systems by solving the corresponding differential equations numerically and we show that the phase transitions of “classical” and “percolation” types are represented, respectively, by the SEIR and SIR models.