In this talk I will give a brief overview of the work I have undertaken in the first few months of my PhD. Starting with a review of some classic thermally-driven instabilities in Newtonian liquids, including Rayleigh-Benard convection and the Marangoni effect, I then consider instabilities within liquid crystal systems. Using an extension of Ericksen-Leslie theory to include thermal effects, Rayleigh-Benard convection in a nematic is considered. Possible extensions of these previously known results are then discussed in the context of the microfluidics of liquid crystal materials.
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