A theory for nonequilibrium phenomena primarily associated with the molecular orientation in liquids and liquid crystals is developed within the framework of irreversible thermodynamics. The alignment tensors of rank 2 and 4 are taken into consideration as additional macroscopic variables. With...

The thermodynamic functions like the internal energy, the entropy, the pressure and the Gibbs free energy are expanded with respect to scalars constructed from the components of the alignment tensors specifying the orientations of the molecules. Microscopic expressions are derived for the...