APPLICATIONS OF PERCOLATION THEORY

Over the past two decades percolation theory has been used to explain and model a wide variety of phenomena that are of industrial and scientific importance. Examples include characterization of porous materials and reservoir rocks, fracture patterns and earthquakes in rocks, calculation of effective transport properties of porous media permeability, conductivity, diffusivity, etc., groundwater flow, polymerization and gelation, biological evolution, galactic formation in the universe, spread of knowledge, and many others. Most of such applications have resulted in qualitative as well as quantitative predictions for the system of interest. This book attempts to describe in simple terms some of these applications, outline the results obtained so far, and provide further references for future reading.

Muhammad Sahimi is with the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He obtained his B.S. from the University of Teheran, Iran, in 1977, and in 1984 his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, both in Chemical Engineering. He has been involved with porous media problems for 15 years. His main areas of research are flow and transport in porous media and fractured rock, diffusion, reaction and macromolecular transport in porous catalysts and membranes, transport, mechanical and fracture properties of disordered materials and rock, and large-scale scientific computations. He has been a consultant to several industrial organizations and a visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, at the University of Porto in Portugal, and at the HLRZ-KFA Supercomputer Center at Jlich in Germany.