Random walks and moving boundaries: Estimating the penetration of diffusants into dense rubbers

For certain materials science scenarios arising in rubber technology, one-dimensional moving boundary problems with kinetic boundary conditions are capable of unveiling the large-time behavior of the diffusants penetration front, giving a direct estimate on the service life of the material. Driven by our interest in estimating how a finite number of diffusant molecules penetrate through a dense rubber, we propose a random walk algorithm to approximate numerically both the concentration profile and the location of the sharp penetration front. The proposed scheme decouples the target evolution system in two steps: (i) the ordinary differential equation corresponding to the evaluation of the speed of the moving boundary is solved via an explicit Euler method, and (ii) the associated diffusion problem is solved by a random walk method. To verify the correctness of our random walk algorithm we compare the resulting approximations to computational results based on a suitable finite element approach with a controlled convergence rate. Our numerical results recover well penetration depth measurements of a controlled experiment designed specifically for this setting.