Figure 7
From: Bidirectional rotation control of a carbon fiber in nematic liquid crystal using AC electric field
We drew the director distribution around (a) the symmetric CF and (c) the irregular shaped CF when they were aligned perpendicular to the far-field director. Red boxes in (a) and (c) indicate the shapes of CFs. In (c), we exaggeratedly expressed the irregular part. We plotted the energy by angle for (b) the symmetric CF and (d) the irregularly shaped CF. The red lines in (b) and (d) indicate the results of fitting by the equation, \(\mathrm{E}=\mathrm{A}{\left(\uptheta -{\uptheta }_{0}\right)}^{\mathrm{P}}+{\mathrm{E}}_{0}\). Comparing this equation with Eq. (3), A is the coefficient of the cylindrical shape of the particle. The value of A was smaller in the symmetric CF than in the irregularly shaped CF. \({\mathrm{E}}_{0}\) is the energy at the ground state. P is the power, which indicates how the energy changes with deformation. In both cases, P was 2. In other words, the energy is proportional to the square of the angle for both cases.
