Excerpt] Increasingly, firms find themselves, either by circumstances or choice, operating in highly turbulent business environments. For them, competitiveness is a constantly moving target. Many, it appears, are satisfied to enjoin the struggle with patched up business models and warmed over bureaucracies. But some, convinced that this is a losing proposition, are aggressively exploring and ev...

The apparent shear viscosity of p-methoxybenzylidene-p'-n-butylaniline in the presence of electrohydrodynamic convection (EHC) is investigated experimentally. In the absence of an electric field, directors are almost aligned along the flow direction such that the viscosity is close to the minimum of the Miesowicz viscosities. Since EHC disturbs the flow-aligned director configuration, the visco...

Oscillatory rheology, at both small and large (LAOS) amplitudes, was performed to measure the dynamic response of a soft solid, formed on dispersing colloids into thermotropic nematic liquid crystal volume fractions ϕ>18%. Due weak homeotropic anchoring nematogens colloid surfaces, Saturn-ring defect line, known as “disclination,” encircles each particle entangles with neighboring disclinations...

Variational problems for the liquid crystal energy of mappings from three-dimensional domains into the real projective plane are studied. More generally, we study the dipole problem, the relaxed energy, and density properties concerning the conformal p-energy of mappings from n-dimensional domains that are constrained to take values into the p-dimensional real projective space, for any positive...

The minimization of nonconvex functionals naturally arises in material sciences where deformation of certain alloys exhibit microstructures. As an example, minimizing sequences of the nonconvex Ericksen-James energy can be associated to deformations in martensitic materials that are observed in experiments, [1, 2]. | From the numerical point of view, classical conforming and nonconforming nite ...

We report the experimental observation of anisotropic diffusion of polystyrene particles immersed in a lyotropic liquid crystal with two different anchoring conditions. Diffusion is shown to obey the Stokes-Einstein law for particle diameters ranging from 190 nm up to 2 μm. In the case of prolate micelles, the beads diffuse four times faster along the director than in perpendicular directions, ...