Monte Carlo simulations of nanorod filler in composite polymer material

Abstract

Conductive polymer (CP) is a special class of polymeric materials with conductive property which possesses high potential for the fabrication of future advanced electronic devices. To design a higher conductivity polymer, composite polymer material with conductive nanorod filler is one of alternative ideas to replace the high-cost intrinsically conductive polymeric materials. In this study, our in-house Monte-Carlo simulation was performed to generate a number of randomly-positioned nanorods within a 3D confined-space box and to assess percolation paths formed by nanorods that connected two electrodes for each configuration. The results showed that the probability of finding connection path was related to the concentrations of nanorod filler in 3D confined-space box. The increasing probability to find connection paths when adding more filler concentrations was found to be a logistic growth, in which growth rate and threshold concentration depended on soft-shell filler radius. Our finding will be beneficial for designing composite conductive polymer for switching sensor.