Abstract

In this work, we consider low contrast periodic media and we study the dependence of the effective or homogenized tensor and the dispersion tensor in terms of the microstructure. We treat both one-dimensional structures and some laminated structures in higher dimension. Interesting properties of the sign of these coefficients are found. Surprisingly, these depend on the microstructure only through the local proportion parameter, and in some cases, they do not depend on the microstructure at all. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.