  We develop a general numerical method to study the zero temperature
properties of strongly correlated electron models on large lattices. The
technique, which resembles Green's Function Monte Carlo, projects the ground
state component from a trial wave function with no approximations. We use this
method to determine the phase diagram of the two-dimensional t-J model, using
the Maxwell construction to investigate electronic phase separation. The shell
effects of fermions on finite-sized periodic lattices are minimized by keeping
the number of electrons fixed at a closed-shell configuration and varying the
size of the lattice. Results obtained for various electron numbers
corresponding to different closed-shells indicate that the finite-size effects
in our calculation are small. For any value of interaction strength, we find
that there is always a value of the electron density above which the system can
lower its energy by forming a two-component phase separated state. Our results
are compared with other calculations on the t-J model. We find that the most
accurate results are consistent with phase separation at all interaction
strengths.
