An extended Flaherty-Keller formula for an elastic composite with densely packed convex inclusions

TL;DR

This paper extends the Flaherty-Keller formula to high-contrast elastic composites with densely packed convex inclusions of arbitrary shape, providing a novel proof and broader applicability for predicting effective elastic properties.

Contribution

It offers a new proof of the Flaherty-Keller formula and extends it to m-convex and curvilinear square inclusions, accommodating arbitrary shapes and zero curvature.

Findings

Extended Flaherty-Keller formula for m-convex inclusions

Method handles inclusions of arbitrary shape, including zero curvature

Improved understanding of elastic modulus minimization in composites

Abstract

In this paper, we are concerned with the effective elastic property of a two-phase high-contrast periodic composite with densely packed inclusions. The equations of linear elasticity are assumed. We first give a novel proof of the Flaherty-Keller formula for elliptic inclusions, which improves a recent result of Kang and Yu (Calc.Var.Partial Differential Equations, 2020). We construct an auxiliary function consisting of the Keller function and an additional corrected function depending on the coefficients of Lam\'e system and the geometry of inclusions, to capture the full singular term of the gradient. On the other hand, this method allows us to deal with the inclusions of arbitrary shape, even with zero curvature. An extended Flaherty-Keller formula is proved for m-convex inclusions, m > 2, curvilinear squares with round off angles, which minimize the elastic modulus under the same volume fraction of hard inclusions.