PNNL

Abstract

Due to lack of knowledge or insufficient data, many physical systems are subject to uncertainty. Such uncertainty occurs on a multiplicity of scales. In this study, we conduct the uncertainty analysis of diffusion in random composites with two dominant scales of uncertainty: Large-scale uncertainty in the spatial arrangement of materials and small-scale uncertainty in the parameters within each material. A general two-scale framework that combines random domain decomposition (RDD) and probabilistic collocation method (PCM) on sparse grids to quantify the large and small scales of uncertainty, respectively. Using sparse grid points instead of standard grids based on full tensor products for both the large and small scales of uncertainty can greatly reduce the overall computational cost, especially for random process with small correlation length (large number of random dimensions). For one-dimensional random contact point problem and random inclusion problem, analytical solution and Monte Carlo simulations have been conducted respectively to verify the accuracy of the combined RDD-PCM approach. Additionally, we employed our combined RDD-PCM approach to two- and three-dimensional examples to demonstrate that our combined RDD-PCM approach provides efficient, robust and nonintrusive approximations for the statistics of diffusion in random composites.