2003 -09 -03
10 :15 at ML J 21

Numerics of Nematic Liquid Crystals

Andreas Prohl

Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich

Liquid Crystals are certain low temperature phases that occur to some anisotropic molecules. In the practically relevant nematic phase, molecules of liquid crystals acquire orientational order but no positional order, i.e. on average they line up with each other locally but their positions are still random. In the talk, we start with a survey over existing continuum (meso-, macroscale) models which describe fluid dynamics. Then, we discuss efficient discretizations of the Ericksen-Leslie model, by using implicit space-time discretizations in combination with penalization/projection strategies.