An operator-splitting method for a liquid crystal model Original Research Article

In this paper an operator-splitting method is applied to find the micro-structure of a liquid crystal model with a simplified Oseen–Frank energy functional. Both projection and penalty methods are used to deal with the constant length constraint. The methods are implemented to compute director fields of liquid crystal slabs of various shapes and with various boundary data. The computational results verify researcher expectations. Some new singularity patterns are observed as well.