Thermoreversible Gel-Dispersed Liquid Crystals

Abstract

A simple model is introduced to describe phase behaviours of binary mixtures of a thermoreversible gel and a low-molecular-weight liquid crystal (LC). We predict novel phase diagrams on the temperature–concentration plane, including sol–gel transition, nematic–isotropic phase transition, and phase separation. At high temperatures, the phase separation between the isotropic sol and gel phases appears. As the temperature decreases, we have the phase separation between nematic sol and isotropic gel phases, in which the nematic domains are dispersed in the isotropic gel phase. We suggest that thermoreversible gelation of reactive molecules mixed with LCs will become one of the new classes of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals.

Keywords

• thermoreversible gel
• liquid crystal
• sol–gel transition
• nematic–isotropic transition
• phase separation