Interior Regularity Estimates in High Conductivity Homogenization and Application

In this paper, uniform pointwise regularity estimates for the solutions of conductivity equations are obtained in a unit conductivity medium reinforced by a epsilon-periodic lattice of highly conducting thin rods. The estimates are derived only at a distance epsilon^{1+tau} (for some tau>0) away from the fibres. This distance constraint is rather sharp since the gradients of the solutions are shown to be unbounded locally in L^p as soon as p>2. One key ingredient is the derivation in dimension two of regularity estimates to the solutions of the equations deduced from a Fourier series expansion with respect to the fibres direction, and weighted by the high-contrast conductivity. The dependence on powers of epsilon of these two-dimensional estimates is shown to be sharp. The initial motivation for this work comes from imaging, and enhanced resolution phenomena observed experimentally in the presence of micro-structures. We use these regularity estimates to characterize the signature of low volume fraction heterogeneities in the fibred reinforced medium assuming that the heterogeneities stay at a distance epsilon^{1+tau} away from the fibres

First Bloch eigenvalue in high contrast media

Thispaperdeals with theasymptotic behavior of thefirstBloch eigenvalue in aheterogeneous medium with a high contrast εY-periodic conductivity. When the conductivity is bounded in L 1 and the constant of the Poincaré-Wirtinger weighted by the conductivity is very small with respect to ε −2, the first Bloch eigenvalue converges as ε → 0 to a limit which preserves the second-order expansion with respect to the Bloch parameter. In dimension two the expansion of the limit can be improved until the fourth-order under the same hypotheses. On the contrary, in dimension three a fibers reinforced medium combined with a L 1-unbounded conductivity leads us to a discontinuity of the limit first Bloch eigenvalue as the Bloch parameter tends to zero but remains not orthogonal to the direction of the fibers. Therefore, the high contrast conductivity of the microstructure induces an anomalous effect, since for a given low-contrast conductivity the first Bloch eigenvalue is known to be analytic with respect to the Bloch parameter around zero