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.