Effective conductivity and average polarizability of random polycrystals

Abstract

A third-order expansion for the effective thermal conductivity tensor κ* of anisotropic polycrystalline cell materials is derived. The coefficients of the expansion are given in terms of the average polarizability tensor, a nondimensional quantity determined from the grain shape and crystallographic orientation distributions independent of other details of the microgeometry such as two (or more) particle correlation functions. Explicit numerical results for a wide variety of microgeometries made of ellipsoidal cells are obtained. This calculation uses a new method that exploits the symmetry properties of the effective conductivity tensor of a cell material as a function of the single-crystal conductivities.