Generalized effective-medium approach to the conductivity of an inhomogeneous material

Abstract

An old effective-medium approximation for the conductivity tensor of a randomly inhomogeneous medium is generalized to treat, in principle, materials consisting of crystallites of arbitrary shape and conductivity tensors of arbitrary symmetry. The effective-medium approximation is roughly analogous to the coherent-potential approximation (CPA) of alloy theory. The analog of the average-$t$-matrix approximation (ATA) is also formulated in a general way. The method is fully tractable analytically for ellipsoidal crystallites. Several applications are discussed. The effective conductivity of a polycrystal consisting of randomly oriented uniaxial crystallites is calculated as a function of the anisotropy of the grains. For a model polycrystal in an intense magnetic field, the CPA and ATA are compared, the former giving more accurate results.