Modeling percolation in high-aspect-ratio fiber systems. II. The effect of waviness on the percolation onset

Abstract

The onset of electrical percolation in nanotube-reinforced composites is often modeled by considering the geometric percolation of a system of penetrable, straight, rigid, capped cylinders, or spherocylinders, despite the fact that embedded nanotubes are not straight and do not penetrate one another. In Part I of this work we investigated the applicability of the soft-core model to the present problem, and concluded that the hard-core approach is more appropriate for modeling electrical percolation onset in nanotube-reinforced composites and other high-aspect-ratio fiber systems. In Part II, we investigate the effect of fiber waviness on percolation onset. Previously, we studied extensively the effect of joint morphology and waviness in two-dimensional nanotube networks. In this work, we present the results of Monte Carlo simulations studying the effect of waviness on the percolation threshold of randomly oriented fibers in three dimensions. The excluded volumes of fibers were found numerically, and relationships between these and percolation thresholds for two different fiber morphologies were found. We build on the work of Part I, and extend the results of our soft-core, wavy fiber simulations to develop an analytical solution using the more relevant hard-core model. Our results show that for high- aspect-ratio fibers, the generally accepted inverse proportionality between percolation threshold and excluded volume holds, independent of fiber waviness. This suggests that, given an expression for excluded volume, an analytical solution can be derived to identify the percolation threshold of a system of high-aspect-ratio fibers, including nanotube-reinforced composites. Further, we show that for high aspect ratios, the percolation threshold of the wavy fiber networks is directly proportional to the analytical straight fiber solution and that the constant of proportionality is a function of the nanotube waviness only. Thus the onset of percolation can be adequately modeled by applying a factor based on fiber geometry to the analytical straight fiber solution.