Related papers: Elasticity of Polydomain Liquid Crystal Elastomers
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
The yet virtually unexplored class of soft colloidal rods with small aspect ratio is investigated and shown to exhibit a very rich phase and dynamic behavior, spanning from liquid to nearly melt state. Instead of nematic order, these short…
We study the relaxation dynamics of a coarse-grained polymer chain at different degrees of stretching by both analytical means and numerical simulations. The macromolecule is modelled as a string of beads, connected by anharmonic springs,…
In this article, we construct and analyze models of anisotropic crosslinked polymers employing tools from the theory of liquid crystal elastomers. The anisotropy of these systems stems from the presence of rigid-rod molecular units in the…
Materials exhibiting a large caloric effect could lead to the development of new generation of heat-management technologies that will have better energy efficiency and be potentially more environmentally friendly. The focus of caloric…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
We develop a molecular model of non-uniform deformations within the framework of liquid crystal rubber elasticity. We show that, similarly to the uniform case, the theory is not sensitive to the molecular details of polymer liquid crystal…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
Mono-layers of stearic and behenic acids and mixtures of them in different proportions, deposited with the Langmuir-Blodgett technique, were used to study the alignment and the alignment dynamics in nematic liquid crystal cells. A…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
Ideal (monodomain) smectic-$A$ elastomers crosslinked in the smectic-$A$ phase are simply uniaxial rubbers, provided deformations are small. From these materials smectic-$C$ elastomers are produced by a cooling through the smectic-$A$ to…
Elastic effects in a model of disordered nematic elastomers are numerically investigated in two dimensions. Networks crosslinked in the isotropic phase exhibit unusual soft mechanical response against stretching. It arises from gradual…
We introduce an anisotropic mean-field approach for the dynamics of semiflexible polymers under intermediate tension, the force range where a chain is partially extended but not in the asymptotic regime of a nearly straight contour. The…
We present nonlinear dynamic equations for nematic and smectic $A$ liquid crystals in the presence of an alternating electric field and explain their derivation in detail. The local electric field acting in any liquid-crystalline system is…
When a chiral isotropic elastomer is brought to low temperature cholesteric phase, the nematic degree of freedom tends to order and form a helix. Due to the nemato-elastic coupling, this also leads to elastic deformation of the polymer…
Experimentally it is possible to manipulate the director in a (chiral) smectic-$A$ elastomer using an electric field. This suggests that the director is not necessarily locked to the layer normal, as described in earlier papers that…
In this work we present results from NPT(isobaric-isothermal) Monte Carlo Simulation studies of Liquid Crystalline Dendrimer (LCDr) systems confined in a slit-pore made of two parallel flat walls. We investigate the substrate induced…
We present a set of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of strongly charged, flexible polyelectrolyte chains under poor solvent conditions in a salt free solution. Structural properties of the chains and of the solutions are reported. By…
A method for simulation of elastoplastic solids in multibody systems with nonsmooth and multidomain dynamics is developed. The solid is discretised into pseudo-particles using the meshfree moving least squares method. The particles carry…
A thermodynamically related model is developed for describing elastic rubber-like behavior of amorphous and crystallizing polymers and demonstrated on example of simple extension. Both the “entropic” and “energetic”…