Tuning the electrical percolation threshold of polymer nanocomposites with rod-like nanofillers

In this communication, a stochastic approach based upon Komori and Makishima's work has been used for predicting the electrical percolation threshold of cylindrical nanofillers with three-dimensional (3D) spatial orientations in a typical nanocomposite system. Specifically, the proposed model was able to predict the volume fraction based percolation threshold of nanofillers with a wide range of aspect ratios (10-1000), which was substantiated with a variety of experimental data sets obtained from the literature. The anisotropic behavior of 3D aligned nanofillers was successfully introduced via in-plane and out-of-plane orientation distributions. The percolation threshold values of nanofillers were also found to be comparable with those obtained from the stochastic model that has incorporated the excluded volume effect.