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Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition inchromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nucleinucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in anisotropic liquid. These tactoids produce topological defects at domainjunctions (disclinations in the bulk or point defects on the surface). Wesimulate such tactoid equilibria and their coarsening dynamics with a modelusing degree of order, a variable length director, and an interfacial normal asstate descriptors. We adopt Ericksen's work and introduce an augmentedOseen-Frank energy, with non-convexity in both interfacial energy and thedependence of the energy on the degree of order. A gradient flow dynamics ofthis energy does not succeed in reproducing some simple expected feature oftactoid dynamics. Therefore, a strategy is devised based on continuumkinematics and thermodynamics to represent such features. The model is used topredict tactoid nucleation, expansion, and coalescence during the process ofphase transition. We reproduce observed behaviors in experiments and perform anexperimentally testable parametric study of the effect of bulk elastic andtactoid interfacial energy parameters on the interaction of interfacial andbulk fields in the tactoids.

Computational modeling of tactoid dynamics in chromonic liquid crystals