Eur. Phys. J. E (2019) 42: 74
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2019-11839-2

Regular Article

Conservation-Dissipation Formalism for soft matter physics: II. Application to non-isothermal nematic liquid crystals

¹ Zhou Pei-Yuan Center for Applied Mathematics, Tsinghua University, 100084, Beijing, P. R. China
² Department of Mathematics, Minjiang University, 350121, Fuzhou, P. R. China

^* e-mail: zcamhl@tsinghua.edu.cn

Received: 4 December 2018
Accepted: 9 May 2019
Published online: 13 June 2019

Abstract

For most existing non-equilibrium theories, the modeling of non-isothermal processes is a hard task. Intrinsic difficulties involve the non-equilibrium temperature, the coexistence of conserved energy and dissipative entropy, etc. In this paper, by taking the non-isothermal flow of nematic liquid crystals as a typical example, we illustrate that thermodynamically consistent models in either vectorial or tensorial forms can be constructed within the framework of the Conservation-Dissipation Formalism (CDF). And the classical isothermal Ericksen-Leslie model and Qian-Sheng model are shown to be special cases of our new vectorial and tensorial models in the isothermal, incompressible and stationary limit. Most importantly, from the above examples, it is known that CDF can easily solve the issues relating with non-isothermal situations in a systematic way. The first and second laws of thermodynamics are satisfied simultaneously. The non-equilibrium temperature is defined self-consistently as a partial derivative of the entropy function. Relaxation-type constitutive relations are constructed, which give rise to classical linear constitutive relations, like Newton's law and Fourier's law, in stationary limits. Therefore, CDF is expected to have a broad scope of applications in soft matter physics, especially under complicated situations, such as non-isothermal, compressible and nanoscale systems.