An Efficient Brownian Motion Simulation Method for the Conductivity of a Digitized Composite Medium

We use the first-passage-time formulation by Torquato, Kim and Cule [J. Appl. Phys., Vol. 85. pp. 1560-1571 (1999)], which makes use of the first-passage region in association with the diffusion tracer's Brownian movement, and develop a new efficient Brownian motion simulation method to compute the effective conductivity of digitized composite media. By using the new method, one can remarkably enhance the speed of the Brownian walkers sampling the medium and thus reduce the computation time. In the new method, we specifically choose the first-passage regions such that they coincide with two, four, or eight digitizing units according to the dimensionality of the composite medium and the local configurations around the Brownian walkers. We first obtain explicit solutions for the relevant first-passage-time equations in two- and three-dimensions. We then apply the new method to solve the illustrative benchmark problem of estimating the effective conductivities of the checkerboard-shaped composite media, for both periodic and random configurations. Simulation results show that the new method can reduce the computation time about by an order of magnitude.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]