Transitions in Poiseuille flow of nematic liquid crystal

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-11-2015

Abstract

Recent experiments by Sengupta et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 2013) [9] revealed interesting transitions that can occur in flow of nematic liquid crystal under carefully controlled conditions within a long microfluidic channel of width much larger than height, and homeotropic anchoring at the walls. At low flow rates the director field of the nematic adopts a configuration that is dominated by the surface anchoring, being nearly parallel to the channel height direction over most of the cross-section; but at high flow rates there is a transition to a flow-dominated state, where the director configuration at the channel centerline is aligned with the flow (perpendicular to the channel height direction). We analyze simple channel-flow solutions to the Leslie-Ericksen model for nematics. We demonstrate that two solutions exist, at all flow rates, but that there is a transition between the elastic free energies of these solutions: the anchoring-dominated solution has the lowest energy at low flow rates, and the flow-dominated solution has lowest energy at high flow rates.

Identifier

84930572326 (Scopus)

Publication Title

International Journal of Non Linear Mechanics

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnonlinmec.2015.04.010

ISSN

00207462

First Page

15

Last Page

21

Volume

75

Grant

NSF-DMS-1211713

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS