Effective Properties of Ferroelectric and/or Ferromagnetic Composites: A Unified Approach and Its Application

A recently developed multiple‐scattering approach for calculating the coupled electrical–mechanical response of composites is generalized to treat more‐complicated coupling between the constituent phases. This provides a unified theoretical framework for determining the effective properties of ferroelectric and/or ferromagnetic composites with any multifield coupled interaction between electrical, magnetic, mechanical, and thermal effects. Among the advantages of the theory is its simplicity of formulation, which is suited to computation. The common non‐self‐consistent approximation (NSCA) and self‐consistent effective medium approximation (SCEMA) of the theory are discussed through application to a number of piezoelectric, pyroelectricpyromagnetic, and magnetoelectric composites.