Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Levy, Ohad
• Cherkaev, Elena

Titel

Effective medium approximations for anisotropic composites with arbitrary component orientation

Ist Teil von

• Journal of applied physics, 2013-10, Vol.114 (16)

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

AIP Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A Maxwell Garnett approximation (MGA) and a symmetric effective medium approximation (SEMA) are derived for anisotropic composites of host-inclusion and symmetric-grains morphologies, respectively, with ellipsoidal grains of arbitrary intrinsic, shape and orientation anisotropies. The effect of anisotropy on the effective dielectric tensor is illustrated in both cases. The MGA shows negative and non-monotonic off-diagonal elements for geometries where the host and inclusions are not mutually aligned. The SEMA leads to an anisotropy-dependent nonlinear behaviour of the conductivity as a function of volume fraction above a percolation threshold of conductor-insulator composites, in contrast to the well-known linear behaviour of the isotropic effective medium model. The percolation threshold obtained for composites of aligned ellipsoids is isotropic and independent of the ellipsoids aspect ratio. Thus, the common identification of the percolation threshold with the depolarization factors of the grains is unjustified and a description of anisotropic percolation requires explicit anisotropic geometric characteristics.