Three-Dimensional Morphological Study of MnTe-like Structures by Assessment of Tortuosity Tensor Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

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This paper focuses on a morphological study of the MnTe-like structures, carried out by the evaluation of the tortuosity tensor and other related parameters using a computational fluid dynamics approach recently developed by our research group. The present work focuses on all possible crystals—existing or not developed yet—having the same structure as that of the manganese telluride. This analysis provides new information not present yet in the open literature. The motivation behind this study lies in the importance of this type of structure in physics and material science. In particular, the structures investigated are anisotropic and bi-disperse, with two independent geometrical parameters controlling the structure shape: the ratio of the particle diameters (r1) and the normalised inter-particle distance (r2). Exploiting this fact, several different structures of the same family are created, changing these two parameters independently, also allowing inter-penetration of particles to enlarge the study’s applicability. The results are primarily obtained in terms of the tortuosity tensor, needed to catch and quantify the anisotropy of the structures. Then, other morphological parameters, such as connectivity, principal diffusion directions, and anisotropy factors, are evaluated, obtaining in this way a novel morphological characterisation of the structure. It is found that high values of tortuosity are observed at lower and higher values of {r1, r2}, which means that there exists a minimum value between them. Additionally, the anisotropy factor is found to be higher at lower values of {r1, r2} and lower at higher ones. This is in accordance with the fact that, as the inter-particle distance and the ratio between particle diameters increase, the structure enlarges, which implies a lower influence of the particle distribution and, thus, a gradually more isotropic structure.