Dendritic patterns from shear-enhanced anisotropy in nematic liquid crystals
Name
sciadv.abq6820.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
764.28 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
aef1b69146d926620fef74a24c2f8dac
Author(s)
Zhang, Qing
Zhou, Shuang
Zhang, Rui
Bischofberger, Irmgard
Date Issued
January 13, 2023
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Zhang, Qing, Zhou, Shuang, Zhang, Rui and Bischofberger, Irmgard. 2023. "Dendritic patterns from shear-enhanced anisotropy in nematic liquid crystals." Science Advances, 9 (2).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Controlling the growth morphology of fluid instabilities is challenging because of their self-amplified and nonlinear growth. The viscous fingering instability, which arises when a less viscous fluid displaces a more viscous one, transitions from exhibiting dense-branching growth characterized by repeated tip splitting of the growing fingers to dendritic growth characterized by stable tips in the presence of anisotropy. We controllably induce such a morphology transition by shear-enhancing the anisotropy of nematic liquid crystal solutions. For fast enough flow induced by the finger growth, the intrinsic tumbling behavior of lyotropic chromonic liquid crystals can be suppressed, which results in a flow alignment of the material. This microscopic change in the director field occurs as the viscous torque from the shear flow becomes dominant over the elastic torque from the nematic potential and macroscopically enhances the liquid crystal anisotropy to induce the transition to dendritic growth.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq6820
