Percolation Effects in Electrical Resistivity of Fine-grained Rock Material

Percolation is a probabilistic phenomenon used in studying the system with phase transition. This concept is most widely used in studying semiconductor where the critical concentration of conductive filler is determined in order to start an electrical flow. In this study, percolation phenomena is used to study the effect of concentration of fine grained conductive rock materials (in this case, clay is used to represent the fine grained rock material) on the overall electrical conductivity of the system. As the critical concentration is determined, further increase in the concentration is done to study the trend afterwards. Besides the concentration of fine grained conductive particles, the amount of water salinity on the system’s conductivity is also investigated using the same approach. The numerical simulation is designed to input user defined concentration of conductive particles, after that it will distribute the conductive particles into the system randomly using Monte Carlo method according to the concentration assigned.