This work summarises different approaches to investigate carbohydrate-based
liquid crystals by means of computer simulations. Liquid crystals play an important
role in various use cases like display technology, nanosciences, pharmacology
and cosmetics. Sugar-based mesogens exhibit, beside their biodegradability
and structural diversity, interesting mesophases. The relations between molecular
properties and supramolecular phase structures in sugar mesogens are not
yet sufficiently understood and predictions of structure-property-relationships
are often not yet possible. Especially, the influence of hydrogen bond networks
is of major importance and has not been investigated for thermotropic liquid
crystals with computational chemistry methods. Two model systems will be
introduced and experiments and results presented to reproduce experimentally
derived data. The influence of polar moieties will be explained and the effect of
enantiopure as well as racemic mixtures of liquid crytal systems on the phase
formation elucidated