Non-isothermal model for the direct isotropic/smectic-A liquid crystalline transition

Abstract

An extension to a high-order model for the direct isotropic/smectic-A liquid crystalline phase transition was derived to take into account thermal effects including anisotropic thermal diffusion and latent heat of phase-ordering. Multi-scale multi-transport simulations of the non-isothermal model were compared to isothermal simulation, showing that the presented model extension corrects the standard Landau-de Gennes prediction from constant growth to diffusion-limited growth, under shallow quench/undercooling conditions. Non-isothermal simulations, where meta-stable nematic pre-ordering precedes smectic-A growth, were also conducted and novel non-monotonic phase-transformation kinetics observed.

First revision: 20 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Non-Isothermal Model for Nematic Spherulite Growth
• Meta-stable nematic pre-ordering in smectic liquid crystalline phase transitions
• Theory and computation of directional nematic phase ordering
• Formation and kinetics of transient metastable states in mixtures under coupled phase ordering and chemical demixing

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Thermodynamics, transition dynamics, and texturing in polymer-dispersed liquid crystals with mesogens exhibiting a direct isotropic/smectic-A transition
• Modeling Smectic Layers in Confined Geometries: Order Parameter and Defects
• Smectic Layering: Landau theory for a complex-tensor order parameter