The effective conductivity of strongly heterogeneous composites

Abstract

We deal with the effective conductivity m = m(z) of two phase, ordered or disordered mixtures consisting of particles of material of conductivity z inserted in a matrix of conductivity 1. We focus on finding bounds on the set of values of z for which the function m is singular or vanishes, and we apply our results to the estimation of the effective conductivity of high contrast mixtures (z = 0 or z = ∞). We find that the zeroes and singularities of the function m lie on an interval of the negative real axis, which depends on the shape of the particles and the interparticle distances. Our results agree with previous numerical calculations for periodic arrays of spheres. In some cases we show that our estimates are optimal. We apply our results about the zeroes and singularities together with the complex variable method, and find bounds on the effective conductivity of matrix-particle random composites. These bounds give good estimations even in cases of high contrast, and, in many cases, they improve substantially over the bounds obtained by other methods, for the same types of high contrast mixtures.