Numerical Simulations of Liquid-Crystalline Polymer Start-Up Flow in an Eccentric Cylinder Geometry using the Doi Theory

Liquid Crystal Polymers (LCP) exhibit a complex rheological behaviour which is mainly due to the intrinsic anisotropy of the macromolecules. The Doi (1981) theory is able to capture many of the essential features of LCP rheology. The main limit of this theory is the assumption that the system is spatially homogeneous. This assumption precludes the theory from accounting for the generation and the proliferation of textures.