Abstract:
Herein, an approach is proposed to analyze the tortuosity of porous electrodes using the
radical Voronoi tessellation. For this purpose, a series of particle compacts geometrically similar
to the actual porous electrode were generated using discrete element method; the radical Voronoi
tessellation was constructed for each compact to characterize the structural properties; the tortuosity
of compact porous structure was simulated by applying the Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm on
radical Voronoi tessellation. Finally, the relationships were established between the tortuosity and the
composition of the ternary particle mixture, and between the tortuosity and the radical Voronoi cell
parameters. The following correlations between tortuosity values and radical Voronoi cell parameters
were found: larger faces and longer edges of radical Voronoi cell leads to the increased fraction of
larger values of tortuosity in the distribution, while smaller faces and shorter edges of radical Voronoi
cell contribute to the increased fraction of smaller tortuosity values, being the tortuosity values more
uniform with narrower distribution. Thus, the compacts with enhanced diffusion properties are
expected to be obtained by packing particle mixtures with high volume fraction of small and medium
particles. These results will help to design the well-packed particle compacts having improved
diffusion properties for various applications including porous electrodes.