Eur. Phys. J. E (2015) 38: 75
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2015-15075-6

Regular Article

Reshaping nemato-elastic sheets

Department of Chemical Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, 32000, Haifa, Israel

^* e-mail: pismen@techunix.technion.ac.il

Received: 16 April 2015
Revised: 10 June 2015
Accepted: 16 June 2015
Published online: 14 July 2015

Abstract

We consider three-dimensional reshaping of thin nemato-elastic sheets containing half-charged defects upon nematic-isotropic transition. Gaussian curvature, that can be evaluated analytically when the nematic texture is known, differs from zero in the entire domain and has a dipole or hexapole singularity, respectively, at defects of positive or negative sign. The latter kind of defects appears in not simply connected domains. Three-dimensional shapes dependent on boundary anchoring are obtained with the help of finite element computations.