Sheared nematic liquid crystal polymer monolayers (Q1000253)

The paper provides a comprehensive study of the 2-D nematic liquid crystal polymers under an arbitrary shear, by discussing phase diagrams for a large range of variation of the corresponding Peclet number. One begins with a short background on the mathematical formulation of the Doi-Hess kinetic model for 2-D homogeneous flows of rigid rod-like molecules immersed in a viscous solvent subject to an imposed field of flows. The physical system is described by a Smoluchowski equation of which the existence of steady state solution is defined by a system of two non-linear equations. The stability of this steady state is studied by a perturbation technique. Numerical stability results are displayed.