On nonstandard Padé approximants suitable for effective properties of two-phase composite materials

Abstract

This article investigates the existence of the nonstandard Padé approximants introduced by Cherkaev and Zhang [D.-L. Zhang and E. Cherkaev, Reconstruction of spectral function from effective permittivity of a composite material using rational function approximations, J. Comput. Phys. 228 (2009), pp. 5390–5409] for approximating the spectral function of composites from effective properties at different frequencies. The spectral functions contain information on microstructure of composites. Since this reconstruction problem is ill-posed Cherkaev [Inverse homogenization for evaluation of effective properties of a mixture, Inverse Probl. 17 (2001), pp. 1203–1218], the well-performed Padé approach is noteworthy and deserves further investigations. In this article, we validate the assumption that the effective dielectric component of interest of all two-phase composites can be approximated by Padé approximants whose denominator has nonzero power one term. We refer to this as the nonstandard Padé approximant, in contrast to the standard approximants whose denominators have nonzero constant terms. For composites whose spectral function assumes infinitely many different values such as the checkerboard microstructure, the proof is carried by using classical results for Markov–Stieltjes functions (also referred to as Stieltjes functions) Golden and Papanicolaou [Bounds on effective parameters of heterogeneous media by analytic continuation, Commun. Math. Phys. 90 (1983), pp. 473–491] and Cherkaev and Ou [De-homogenization: Reconstruction of moments of the spectral measure of the composite, Inverse Probl. 24 (2008), p. 065008]. However, it is well-known that spectral functions for microstructure such as rank-n laminates assume only finitely many different values, i.e. the measure in the Markov–Stieltjes function is supported at only finitely many points. For this case, we cannot find any existence results for nonstandard Padé approximants in the literature. The proof for this case is the focus of this article. It is done by utilizing a special product decomposition of the coefficient matrix of the Padé system. The results in this article can be considered as an extension of the Padé theory for Markov–Stieltjes functions whose spectral function take infinitely many different values to those taking only finitely many values. In the literature, the latter is usually excluded from the definition of Markov–Stieltjes functions because they correspond to rational functions, hence convergence of their Padé approximants is trivial. However, from an inverse problem point of view, we need to assure both the existence and convergence of the nonstandard Padé approximants, for all microstructures. The results in this article provide a mathematical foundation for applying the Padé approach for reconstructing the spectral functions of composites whose microstructure is not a priori known.

Keywords:

• effective properties of composites
• microstructure
• spectral functions
• nonstandard Padé approximants
• Stieltjes functions
• inverse homogenization

AMS Subject Classification::

• 30E10

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank E. Cherkaev and D. Zhang for bringing to her attention the problem regarding the existence of nonstandard Padé approximants for IRF. This research is partially sponsored by the ARRA-NSF Mathematical Biology Grant DMS-0920852.