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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2011
An equivalent circuit model of electrical conduction in polymer-filler particulate composites was developed in this study. The equivalent circuit was constructed for an individual composite particle with a sub-monolayer of conductive filler, where the filler particles play the role of circuit nodes, and inter-particle contacts are represented by resistors between the nodes. The mathematical representation of the equivalent circuit in the form of a linear system of equations for nodal potentials was solved numerically with Matlab software to calculate conductance of the composite as a function of the amount of conductive filler, filled fraction of the monolayer, filler-to-matrix size ratio and the degree of structuredness (non-randomness) of the filler material. Additionally, percolation concentrations and statistical distributions of composite conductance were calculated as functions of the filler-to-matrix size ratio.