NEW THIRD-ORDER BOUNDS ON THE EFFECTIVE MODULI OF N-PHASE COMPOSITES.
We develop some new bounds on the effective moduli of TV-phase composites. These new bounds are accurate up to and including terms of third order in 0(| — Kj\, |^ — Hj\), where Kt and n, are the bulk and shear modulus, respectively, of phase i. These bounds use the same statistical information as McCoy's and BeranMolyneux's bounds but are tighter than, or at worst coincident with, the latter bounds. We also present in the appendix a new perturbation solution for the effective moduli which only requires that | <5|i | = 0(| — fij |) be small.