Related papers: Wetting hysteresis induced by nanodefects
Raindrops falling on window panes spread upon contact, whereas hail can cause dents or scratches on the same glass window upon contact. While the former phenomenon resembles classical wetting, the latter is dictated by contact and adhesion…
We investigate theoretically the wetting properties of cholesteric liquid crystals at a planar substrate. If the properties of substrate and of the interface are such that the cholesteric layers are not distorted the wetting properties are…
Liquid water can become metastable with respect to its vapor in hydrophobic confinement. The resulting dewetting transitions are often impeded by large kinetic barriers. According to macroscopic theory, such barriers arise from the free…
We describe observations of a novel hysteresis behavior in the growth of ice crystals under near-vacuum conditions. Above a threshold supersaturation, we find that the ice growth rate often exhibits a sudden increase that we attribute to an…
The contact line of a liquid drop on a solid exerts a nanometrically sharp surface traction. This provides an unprecedented tool to study highly localised and dynamic surface deformations of soft polymer networks. One of the outstanding…
Under partial wetting conditions, making a substrate uniformly rougher enhances the wetting characteristics of the corresponding smooth substrate {--} hydrophilic systems become even more hydrophilic and hydrophobic systems even more…
Quantifying wettability at the nanoscale remains challenging, as macroscopic contact-angle measurements fail to capture the molecular interactions that define hydrophilic and hydrophobic behavior. We derive an analytical relation linking…
Intuitively, slow droplets stick to a surface and faster droplets splash or bounce. However, recent work suggests that on non-wetting surfaces, whether microdroplets stick or bounce depends only on their size and fluid properties, but not…
We investigate directly at the microscale the morphology of the electrowetting induced transition between the Cassie-Baxter and Wenzel states for a water droplet on a superhydrophobic surface. Our experiments demonstrate that the transition…
The sliding friction of a dimer moving over a periodic substrate and subjected to an external force is studied in the steady state for arbitrary temperatures within a one-dimensional model. Nonlinear phenomena that emerge include dynamic…
We experimentally study the formation of surface patterns in grafted hydrogel films of nanometer-to-micrometer thicknesses during imbibition-driven swelling followed by evaporation-driven shrinking. Creases are known to form at the hydrogel…
Natural faults often contain a fluid-saturated, granular fault-gouge layer, whose failure and sliding processes play a central role in earthquake dynamics. Using a two-dimensional discrete element model coupled with fluid dynamics, we…
It is established that roughness and chemistry play a crucial role in the wetting properties of a substrate. Yet, few studies have analyzed systematically the effect of the non-uniformity in the distribution of texture and surface tension…
The annealing of sub-critical Ge wetting layers (WL<3.5 ML) initiates the formation of 3D nanostructures, whose shape and orientation is determined by the WL thickness and thus directly related to the strain energy. The emergence of these…
The wetting behaviour of surfaces is important for various applications like super-hydrophobic surfaces, enhanced oil recovery, mining of metal ores and anti-icing surfaces etc. For rough surfaces, which are the rule rather than the…
Using as a starting point conservation of momentum, a multiphase mechanical energy balance equation is derived that accounts for multiple material phases and interfaces present within a moving control volume. This balance is applied to a…
Motivated by the observations of intracellular phase separations and the wetting of cell membranes by protein droplets, we study the nonequilibrium surface wetting by Monte Carlo simulations of a lattice gas model involving particle…
The non-equilibrium dynamics of condensation phenomena in nano-pores is studied via Monte Carlo simulation of a lattice gas model. Hysteretic behavior of the particle density as a function of the density of a reservoir is obtained for…
We study the interplay between hysteresis and equilibrium behavior in capillary condensation of fluids in mesoporous disordered materials via a mean-field density functional theory of a disordered lattice-gas model. The approach reproduces…
Pinning of liquid droplets on solid substrates is ubiquitous and plays an essential role in many applications, especially in various areas, such as microfluidics and biology. Although pinning can often reduce the efficiency of various…