Related papers: Nematic liquid crystal flow driven by time-varying…
We provide a minimal model for an active nematic film in contact with both a solid substrate and a passive isotropic fluid, and explore its dynamics in one and two dimensions using a combination of hybrid Lattice Boltzmann simulations and…
Advent of nematic liquid crystals flows have attracted renewed attention in view of microfluidic transport phenomena. Among various transport processes, electroosmosis stands as one of the efficient flow actuation method through narrow…
We extend the continuum theories of active nematohydrodynamics to model a two-fluid mixture with separate velocity fields for each fluid component, coupled through a viscous drag. The model is used to study an active nematic fluid, mixed…
Cell monolayers are a central model system to tissue biophysics. In vivo, epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and curvature's role in the onset of spontaneous tissue flows is still not well-understood. Here, we present a…
Understanding the flow of liquid crystals in microfluidic environments plays an important role in many fields, including device design and microbiology. We perform hybrid lattice-Boltzmann simulations of a nematic liquid crystal flowing…
Active liquid crystals or active gels are soft materials which can be physically realised e.g. by preparing a solution of cytoskeletal filaments interacting with molecular motors. We study the hydrodynamics of an active liquid crystal in a…
Active nematic fluids confined in narrow channels generate spontaneous flows when the activity is sufficiently intense. Recently, it was shown that if the molecular anchoring at the channel walls is conflicting flows are initiated even in…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
A body immersed in a nematic liquid crystal disturbs the fluid's preferred molecular configuration and increases its stored elastic energy. In an active nematic, the fluid components also generate a stress in the bulk fluid. By introducing…
We analyse the influence of a surface viscosity on the orientational dynamics of a nematic liquid crystal subjected to an oscillatory Couette flow. Approximate analytical solutions of nematohydrodynamic equations for small flow amplitudes…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
We use active nematohydrodynamics to study the flow of an active fluid in a 3D microchannel, finding a transition between active turbulence and regimes where there is a net flow along the channel. We show that the net flow is only possible…
We develop a formal analogy between configurational stresses in two distinct physical systems, and study the flows that they induce when the configurations of interest include topological de- fects. The two systems in question are…
The anchoring of nematic liquid crystals on surfaces with grafted liquid crystalline chain molecules is studied by computer simulations and within a mean field approach. The computer simulations show that a swollen layer of collectively…
Our fluid dynamics video shows the response of a layer of viscoelastic fluid to an array of four-roll mills steadily rotating underneath. When the relaxation time of the fluid is sufficiently long, the fluid divides into "cells" with a…
A surface in contact with the isotropic phase of a passive liquid crystal can induce nematic order over distances that range from microscopic to macroscopic when the nematic-isotropic interface undergoes an orientational-wetting transition.…
Activity in nematics drives interfacial flows that lead to preferential alignment that is tangential or planar for extensile systems (pushers) and perpendicular or homeotropic for contractile ones (pullers). This alignment is known as…
We report hybrid lattice Boltzmann (HLB) simulations of the hydrodynamics of an active nematic liquid crystal sandwiched between confining walls with various anchoring conditions. We confirm the existence of a transition between a passive…
We use a continuum, two-fluid approach to study a mixture of two active nematic fluids. Even in the absence of thermodynamically-driven ordering, for mixtures of different activities we observe turbulent microphase separation, where domains…
We use linear stability analysis and hybrid lattice Boltzmann simulations to study the dynamical behaviour of an active nematic confined in a channel made of viscoelastic material. We find that the quiescent, ordered active nematic is…