Electro-osmosis in nematic liquid crystals
Soft Condensed Matter
2016-07-20 v2 Materials Science
Abstract
We derive a mathematical model of a nematic electrolyte based on a variational formulation of nematodynamics. Extending our previous work, we consider a general setup which incorporates dielectric anisotropy of the liquid-crystalline matrix and the full set of nematic viscosities. We verify the model by comparing its predictions to the results of the experiments on the substrate-controlled liquid-crystal-enabled electrokinetics. In the experiments a nematic liquid crystal confined to a thin planar cell with surface-patterned anchoring conditions exhibit electro-osmotic flows along the "guiding rails" imposed by the spatially varying director.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1604.01439,
title = {Electro-osmosis in nematic liquid crystals},
author = {O. M. Tovkach and M. Carme Calderer and Dmitry Golovaty and Oleg Lavrentovich and Noel J. Walkington},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1604.01439},
year = {2016}
}