Computing transport properties of heterogeneous media by an optimization method

The problem of computing the effective transport and mechanical properties of disordered materials, modeled by random or correlated percolation networks, is studied as an optimization problem. We show that calculating an optimal distribution of the potentials (voltages, displacements, etc.) throughout a disordered material that minimizes its total energy reduces the computation times for calculating the effective properties by a factor that depending on the morphology of the system, ranges from 3 to 73. Hence, this offers significant speed-up over the most efficient numerical methods currently available.