Simulation of the Thermal Orientation Effect in Nematic Liquid Crystals

Abstract

this study analyzes the thermal orientation effect using a 2D simplified dynamic model of a liquid crystal with acoustic approximation. We assumed that the effect occurs when one of the boundaries of a rectangular liquid crystal layer is heated. To solve the system of equations, we used a two-cycle splitting method of splitting with respect to spatial variables in combination with a finite-difference scheme of Godunov gap decay for the acoustic equations and the Ivanov scheme with controlled energy dissipation for the heat conductivity equation. This combination of finite-difference methods enables the analysis of the thermomechanical processes with the same time and space steps satisfying the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy criterion. We implemented the numerical algorithm as a parallel program in C++. For parallelization, we used NVIDIA graphic accelerators and CUDA technology. The analysis showed the impossibility of observing the re-orientation effect in liquid crystal molecules caused by temperature for the given simplified model with acoustic approximation. We concluded that when taking into account the surface tension forces, this effect will be observed in the model used.