Fluctuation of Transport Properties of Random Heterogeneous Media

Abstract

The notion of effective transport property of a heterogeneous medium implies that the medium is large enough that the ergodic theorem holds and local fluctuation of the property can be neglected. In case that the medium is not large enough compared to its characteristic microstructure length scale, the effective property fluctuates and differs from the value of the medium being large enough. As a representative transport phenomenon, diffusion was considered and the fluctuation of varying effective diffusion property, diffusion coarseness , was defined as a quantifying parameter. Scaled effective diffusion property, >/k and were computed for the two phase random media consisting of matrix of diffusion coefficient k and spheres of diffusion coefficient k. Numerical simulations were performed by use of the so-called first passage time technique and data were collected for existing microstructure models of hard spheres(HS), overlapping spheres(OS) and penetrable concentric shells(PCS).