Nonexistence of smooth solutions for a full viscous isentropic liquid crystal system in three dimensions

• Smooth solutions to the liquid crystal system blow up in a finite time.
• The condition for the blow up depends on the stress tensor coefficients.
• The nature of blow up is similar to the case of compressible Navier–Stokes system.
• The condition for the blow up can be checked experimentally.
• The increasing of temperature promotes the blow up.

We prove that the smooth solutions to the Cauchy problem for a full isentropic three-dimensional liquid crystal nematodynamic equations with conserved mass, linear momentum, and dissipating total energy, can lose classical smoothness within a finite time.