Kinetics of spinodal decomposition in mixtures of low molecular weight liquid crystals and flexible polymers

In this paper, the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau model for mixtures containing nematogens has been applied to mixtures of low molecular weight liquid crystals and flexible polymers. Dynamic equations for the time evolution of concentration and orientation fluctuations and the structure factors for these fluctuations are given. It is shown that the coupling between concentration and orientation fluctuations is absent in the isotropic spinodal region, thus the evolution of the structure factors for the concentration fluctuations falls into the Cahn-Hilliard classic category and it exhibits no maximum in the structure factors of orientation fluctuations. We should emphasize that, in the anisotropic spinodal region, both concentration and orientation structure factors possess a maximum but not coincide with each other and both are shifting to smaller wave numbers according to the scaling relation, q_max ∼ τ^-a, as time increases. The value of a closely correlates to the interfacial free-energy parameters.