Structural disorder and anomalous diffusion in random packing of spheres

Palombo, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4892-7967, Gabrielli, A., Servedio, V. D. P., Ruocco, G. and Capuani, S. 2013. Structural disorder and anomalous diffusion in random packing of spheres. Scientific Reports 3 , 2631. 10.1038/srep02631

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Abstract

Nowadays Nuclear Magnetic Resonance diffusion (dNMR) measurements of water molecules in heterogeneous systems have broad applications in material science, biophysics and medicine. Up to now, microstructural rearrangement in media has been experimentally investigated by studying the diffusion coefficient (D(t)) behavior in the tortuosity limit. However, this method is not able to describe structural disorder and transitions in complex systems. Here we show that, according to the continuous time random walk framework, the dNMR measurable parameter α, quantifying the anomalous regime of D(t), provides a quantitative characterization of structural disorder and structural transition in heterogeneous systems. To demonstrate this, we compare α measurements obtained in random packed monodisperse micro-spheres with Molecular Dynamics simulations of disordered porous media and 3D Monte Carlo simulation of particles diffusion in these kind of systems. Experimental results agree well with simulations that correlate the most used parameters and functions characterizing the disorder in porous media.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Additional Information:	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Publisher:	Nature Research
ISSN:	2045-2322
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 March 2022
Last Modified:	12 May 2023 21:10
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/147915

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