U.S.-Netherlands Cooperative Research: Models for Fluids Exhibiting Percolation

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This award will enable Professor James T. Dufty of the University of Florida to collaborate with Professor Matthieu H. Ernst and others of the State University of Utrecht, The Netherlands in research on mathematical models of percolation in fluids. Their general objective is to gain an improved theoretical understanding of the microscopic basis for transport properties of simple fluids. Diffusion is among the most fundamental of dynamical processes in fluids and other materials. The researchers will work first on random lattice models that represent diffusion as random walks on a disordered lattice, approximating the confinement of an atom or particle in a dense liquid (as, for example, in percolation processes). Such models are the simplest in a hierarchy of increasingly realistic descriptions of fluid dynamical behavior. Results from these random lattice models will provide the basis for a similar study of the Lorentz gas, an idealized fluid, to resolve discrepancies between theory and computer simulations. Professor Ernst and his colleagues at Utrecht possess outstanding theoretical and computational expertise in random lattice models and the Lorentz gas. Professor Dufty has developed numerical and analytical tools for kinetic models of bound state transport properties. These complementary strengths, and the overlapping background of the collaborators in modern kinetic theory methods, should lead to significant progress in this area of statistical mechanics. Ultimately, a better understanding of transport properties in systems with percolation will have value in many scientific disciplines and industrial applications.