Abstract
Nematic liquid crystals within a microfluidic device offer interesting insights into the director equilibrium induced by the confining surfaces. Particularly, within microchannels possessing well defined boundary conditions, the nature of anchoring and proximity of the surfaces allow us to control the topology and evolution of defect structures. Furthermore, the surface-induced static equilibrium serves as the initial conditions for the subsequent flow phenomena. In this chapter we shall look into the static equilibrium of the nematic director field, and demonstrate experimental routes to controlled evolution of defects. By tuning the surface anchoring and channel dimensions, different topological possibilities are explored here. The numerical simulations for linear homeotropic microchannels were carried out in collaboration with Miha Ravnik and Julia M Yeomans. In parts this chapter is adapted with permission from the author’s original works published in the Physical Review Letters 110, 048303 (2013) and Soft Matter 9, 1937 (2013)
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Sengupta, A. (2013). Nematic Liquid Crystals Confined Within a Microfluidic Device: Static Case. In: Topological Microfluidics. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00858-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00858-5_5
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