Research on transport, self-assembly and defect dynamics within confined, flowing liquid crystals requires versatile and computationally efficient mesoscopic algorithms to account for fluctuating nematohydrodynamic interactions. We present a multi-particle collision dynamics (MPCD) based algorithm to simulate liquid-crystal hydrodynamic and director fields in two and three dimensions. The nematic-MPCD method is shown to successfully reproduce the features of a nematic liquid crystal, including a nematic-isotropic phase transition with hysteresis in 3D, defect dynamics, isotropic Frank elastic coefficients, tumbling and shear alignment regimes and boundary condition dependent order parameter fields.
@article{arxiv.1504.04745,
title = {Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics Algorithm for Nematic Fluids},
author = {Tyler N. Shendruk and Julia M. Yeomans},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.04745},
year = {2016}
}