Multipole analysis of a generic system of dielectric cylinders and application to fibrous materials

A multipole theory describing the interactions between dielectric cylinders in a uniform field is developed. We treat the most general case of N parallel cylinders placed in arbitrary positions. The exact theory is obtained by developing the polarisation charge surface density on each cylinder in a Fourier series. The related coefficients, the so-called multipoles, may be obtained from a linear set of equations which is derived and analysed in the paper. For systems of closely spaced cylinders, with high ratio of the dielectric constant of the cylinders compared to that of the homogeneous medium (in the worst case, conductive cylinders in contact with each other) a very large number of multipole terms is required to achieve convergence. In spite of the large number of required terms, the general multipole expansion is rapidly convergent in all other cases and is important from a theoretical point of view. Numerical results are presented for canonical dispositions of cylinders and for more complicated arrangements. Finally, such a multipole expansion has been applied to the dielectric characterisation of composite materials formed by a regular array of parallel cylinders, thereby obtaining the equivalent permittivity using a numerically efficient technique. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.