Numerical simulation of flow in smectic liquid crystals

Our aim is to simulate a nonlinear system of ODEs describing the flow in smectic liquid crystals. The nonlinear system is first linearized. We present a direct approach to compute the exact analytic solution of this linear system and use this solution as a starting profile in the Matlab package bvpsuite2.0 to obtain the approximate solution to the nonlinear system. Although, the solution of the nonlinear system has steep boundary layers and therefore is difficult to resolve, we demonstrate that bvpsuite2.0 can cope with the problem and provide an approximation with reasonable accuracy.