Abstract
The effective thermal conductivity of composite materials containing perfectly-conducting, perfectly-aligned, spheroidal inclusions has been computed to O(c 2 ), where c is the volume fraction of the inclusions, by incorporating two-particle interactions in a rigorous fashion. Relevant two-particle problems were solved by boundary collocation and method of reflections in the near and far fields, respectively. Our results for the effective thermal conductivity are rigorous extensions of Maxwell's theory in the form of an expansion in small cℓ a , where ℓ is the spheroid aspect ratio (α = 1 for oblate and α = 2 for prolate spheroids).