Random Network Models

The common way to compute hydraulic and electric flow in porous media is to substitute the pore structure by a network consisting of nodesNode (for pores) and bondsBond (for the interconnecting throatsThroat). Different ways of constructing such models, and computation of their hydraulic and electric conductivity, are reviewed in Sect. 4.1. Section 4.2 introduces more than a dozen measures used to characterize the randomness and connectedness of such models. Section 4.3 treats three recently discovered phenomena arising in veryLarge-scale networks large-scale networks: the emergence of connectivityConnectivity and appearance of a giant componentGiant component in evolving random networksRandom networks; the scale-free distributionScale-free distribution of the nodes’ coordination numbersNodes’ coordination number; and the networks’ “small-worldSmall-world” property[aut]Barabási Albert-László (Barabási 2018).