Electroconductivity of a medium with thin low-resistivity inclusions

One of the self-consistent schemes named as the effective field method is described as the means to determine the effective conductivity tensor of heterogeneous medium. The method is characterized by its simplicity of realization, and in contrast with other popular self-consistent schemes (EMA and DEM) it allows to take into account some details of the spatial distribution of inclusions. We use this method for the effective conductivity calculation of a heterogeneous medium containing thin inclusions with electrical conductivity much larger than that of the matrix. The calculations were carried out for ellipsoidal particles. The spatial distribution of particles was simulated by introducing the ellipsoidal correlation hole in which the arbitrary inclusion is located. We considered the cases when the inclusions were parallel, their projections on the plane orthogonal to the minor axis were distributed randomly and the inclusions were oriented randomly. Analysis of the results showed that the effective conductivity of a medium strongly depends on the correlation of the spatial distribution of particles.