Evaluating backreaction with the ellipsoidal collapse model

We evaluate the effect of structure formation on the average expansion rate with a statistical treatment where density peaks and troughs are modelled as homogeneous ellipsoids. This extends earlier work that used spherical regions. We find that the shear and the presence of filamentary and planar structures have only a small impact on the results. The expansion rate times the age of the universe Ht increases from 2/3 to 0.83 at late times, in order of magnitude agreement with observations, although the change is slower and takes longer than in the real universe. We discuss shortcomings that have to be addressed for this and similar statistical models in the literature to develop into realistic quantitative treatment of backreaction.