  We have studied the multipole polarizability of a graded spherical particle
in a nonuniform electric field, in which the conductivity can vary radially
inside the particle. The main objective of this work is to access the effects
of multipole interactions at small interparticle separations, which can be
important in non-dilute suspensions of functionally graded materials. The
nonuniform electric field arises either from that applied on the particle or
from the local field of all other particles. We developed a differential
effective multipole moment approximation (DEMMA) to compute the multipole
moment of a graded spherical particle in a nonuniform external field. Moreover,
we compare the DEMMA results with the exact results of the power-law graded
profile and the agreement is excellent. The extension to anisotropic DEMMA will
be studied in an Appendix.
