  The Landau-de Gennes energy in nematic liquid crystals depends on four
elastic constants $L_1$, $L_2$, $L_3$, $L_4$. In the case of $L_4\neq 0$, Ball
and Majumdar (Mol. Cryst. Liq. Cryst., 2010) found an example that the original
Landau-de Gennes energy functional in physics does not satisfy a coercivity
condition, which causes a problem in mathematics to establish existence of
energy minimizers. At first, we introduce a new Landau-de Gennes energy density
with $L_4\neq 0$, which is equivalent to the original Landau-de Gennes density
for uniaxial tensors and satisfies the coercivity condition for all
$Q$-tensors. Secondly, we prove that solutions of the Landau-de Gennes system
can approach a solution of the $Q$-tensor Oseen-Frank system without using
energy minimizers. Thirdly, we develop a new approach to generalize the Nguyen
and Zarnescu (Calc. Var. PDEs, 2013) convergence result to the case of non-zero
elastic constants $L_2$, $L_3$, $L_4$.
