Optimal anisotropic three-phase conducting composites: Plane problem

The paper establishes tight lower bound for effective conductivity tensor K∗ of two-dimensional three-phase conducting anisotropic composites and defines optimal microstructures. It is assumed that three materials are mixed with fixed volume fractions and that the conductivity of one of the materials is infinite. The bound expands the Hashin–Shtrikman and translation bounds to multiphase structures, it is derived using a combination of translation method and additional inequalities on the fields in the materials; similar technique was used by Nesi (1995) and Cherkaev (2009) for isotropic multiphase composites. This paper expands the bounds to the anisotropic composites with effective conductivity tensor K∗. The lower bound of conductivity (G-closure) is a piece-wise analytic function of eigenvalues of K∗, that depends only on conductivities of components and their volume fractions. Also, we find optimal microstructures that realize the bounds, developing the technique suggested earlier by Albin et al. (2007a) and Cherkaev (2009). The optimal microstructures are laminates of some rank for all regions. The found structures match the bounds in all but one region of parameters; we discuss the reason for the gap and numerically estimate it.