Generalized Director Approach for Liquid-Crystal-Based Reconfigurable RF Devices

This letter presents a closed-form integral-equation formulation that models the director tilting in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). The proposed formulation is computationally efficient compared to numerical methods and provides physical insight into the matter. Our previous work is generalized from the one-constant approach to all the possible cases that cover the elastic constants. These constants determine in great extent the electrical properties of the LC, and subsequently, the response of the reconfigurable devices that make use of it. Therefore, a more precise but still simple modeling of their influence is pursued here. Simulations show good agreement with numerical implementations. In comparison, the error in the estimation is considerably reduced when using the integral-equation formulation, especially as the polarization voltage or the dielectric anisotropy decreases.