Models of electrical conduction in nanoparticle filled polymers

Abstract

This paper presents two different approaches to modeling electrical conduction in metal filled extrinsically conductive polymers. The first approach uses standard percolation theory to estimate the electrical conductivity of the nanoparticle-polymer composite. The second uses a matrix iterative method to include the contribution to conductivity from carrier tunneling and polymer conductivity. This second method provides a much better approximation for cases, such as this one, in which the filler particle size is very small.