A new approach to non-isothermal models for nematic liquid crystals

We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws of classical thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all essential features of physically relevant models; in particular, the effect of stretching of the director field is taken into account. In addition, the associated initial-boundary value problem admits global-in-time weak solutions without any essential restrictions on the size of the initial data.