화학공학소재연구정보센터
Rheologica Acta, Vol.49, No.4, 335-347, 2010
Effects of strong anchoring on the dynamic moduli of heterogeneous nematic polymers II: oblique anchoring angles
We extend previous work on the linear viscoelastic moduli of heterogeneous nematic polymers in a small-amplitude oscillatory shear flow, focusing on the role of the orientational anchoring conditions at the plates. When tangential or normal anchoring conditions are applied, the Doi-Marrucci-Greco orientation tensor-flow model effectively reduces to the Leslie-Ericksen director-flow model, predicting that director distortions control the dynamic moduli with negligible contributions from tensor-order parameters. In this paper, we examine oblique anchoring angles. We use a combination of analysis and numerical simulation on the generalized tensor-flow system for arbitrary anchoring conditions to show that any oblique anchoring condition induces a nontrivial order parameter contribution to the dynamic moduli, which vanishes only in the limit of tangential or normal anchoring. Our approach reveals that the storage and loss moduli admit an approximate decomposition in terms of two reduced problems that are exactly solvable: the heterogeneous director-flow response plus the monodomain tensor response to an imposed shear. The importance of this result is that we gain scaling properties of the moduli with respect to material parameters and experimental conditions without having to compute and assimilate across the full parameter space. These results provide insight into the relative importance of the distortional vs bulk nematic elastic stress in determining the viscoelastic moduli, predicting that anchoring conditions tune the relative contributions.