New exact results for the effective electric, elastic, piezoelectric and other properties of composite ellipsoid assemblages

In this paper we present a unified treatment of composite ellipsoid assemblages in the setting of uncoupled phenomena like conductivity and elasticity and coupled phenomena like thermoelectricity and piezomagnetoelectricity. The building block of this microgeometry is a confocal ellipsoidal particle consisting of a (possibly void) core and a coating. All space is filled up with such units which have different sizes but possess the same aspect ratios. The confocal ellipsoids may have the same orientation in space or may be randomly oriented. The resulting microgeometry simulates two-phase composites in which the reinforcing components are short fibers or elongated particles. Our main interest is in obtaining information of an exact nature on the effective moduli of this microgeometry whose effective tensor symmetry structure depends on the packing mode of the coated ellipsoids. This information will sometimes be complete like the full effective thermoelectric tensor of an assemblage which contains aligned ellipsoids in which the coating is isotropic and the core is arbitrarily anisotropic. In the majority of the cases however the maximum achievable exact information will be only partial and will appear in the form of certain exact relations between the effective moduli of the microgeometry. These exact relations are obtained from exact solutions for the fields in the microstructure for a certain set of loading conditions. In all the considered cases an isotropic coating can be combined with a fully arbitrary core. This covers the most important physical case of anisotropic fibers in an isotropic matrix. Allowing anisotropy in the coating requires the fulfillment of certain constraint conditions between its moduli. Even though in this case the presence of such constraint conditions may render the anisotropic coating material hypothetical, the value of the derived solutions remains since they still provide benchmark comparisons for approximate and numerical treatments. The remarkable feature of the general analysis which covers all treated uncoupled and coupled phenomena is that it is developed solely on the basis of potential solutions of the conduction problem in the same microgeometry. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.