Related papers: Flexible hydrogels connecting adhesion and wetting
A hydrophilic liquid, such as water, forms hydrogen bonds with a hydrophilic substrate. The strength and locality of the hydrogen bonding interactions prohibit slip of the liquid over the substrate. The question then arises how the contact…
Liquid droplets on soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, can induce substantial surface deformations, leading to the formation of wetting ridges at contact points. While these contact ridges have been shown to govern the rich surface…
When a soft hydrogel sphere is placed on a rigid hydrophilic substrate, it undergoes arrested spreading by forming an axisymmetric foot near the contact line, while conserving its global spherical shape. In contrast, liquid water (that…
Conventional wetting theories on rough surfaces with Wenzel, Cassie-Baxter, and Penetrate modes suggest the possibility of tuning the contact angle by adjusting the surface texture. Despite decades of intensive study, there are still many…
We use molecular simulations to demonstrate the connection between transverse water-water correlations and wetting phenomena for a range of hydrophobic to hydrophilic solid surfaces.Near superhydrophobic surfaces, the correlations are long…
The contact angle that a liquid drop makes on a soft substrate does not obey the classical Young's relation, since the solid is deformed elastically by the action of the capillary forces. The finite elasticity of the solid also renders the…
The study of wetting phenomena is of great interest due to the multifaceted technological applications of hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. The theoretical approaches proposed by Wenzel and later by Cassie and Baxter to describe the…
The equilibrium shape of liquid drops on elastic substrates is determined by minimising elastic and capillary free energies, focusing on thick incompressible substrates. The problem is governed by three length scales: the size of the drop…
Electrowetting is a commonly used tool to manipulate sessile drops on hydrophobic surfaces. By applying an external voltage over a liquid and a dielectric-coated surface, one achieves a reduction of the macroscopic contact angles for…
Contact involving soft materials often combines dry adhesion, sliding friction, and large deformations. At the local level, these three aspects are rarely captured simultaneously, but included in the theoretical models by Mergel et al.…
The wetting of solid surfaces can be manoeuvred by altering the energy balance at the interfacial region. While electric field acts favourably to spread a droplet on a rigid surface, this tendency may be significantly suppressed over soft…
We study the interaction of an elastic beam with a liquid drop in the case where bending and extensional effects are both present. We use a variational approach to derive equilibrium equations and constitutive relation for the beam. This…
We investigate the wetting properties of the simplest element of an array of random fibers: two rigid fibers crossing with an inclination angle and in contact with a droplet of a perfectly wetting liquid. We show experimentally that the…
Wetting and drying phenomena are studied for flexible and semiflexible polymer solutions via coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations. The study is based on the use of Young's equation for the…
The wetting of solid surfaces by fluids is a problem of great practical importance that has been extensively studied over the years. Most often, the experimental work has involved measurements of the contact angle made by a liquid on the…
It is demonstrated that polymers sticking out of the surface of a neutral hydrogel are capable of preventing adhesive forces from pulling a hydrogel into close contact with a surface against which it is pressed. The proposed mechanism for…
We have studied the breakup and subsequent fluid flow in very thin films of partially wetting liquid on solid substrates, using molecular dynamics simulations. The liquid is made of short chain molecules interacting with Lennard-Jones…
We present a theoretical study of wetting phenomena and interactions between liquid-vapor interfaces based on the density functional theory. The focus is mostly on the impact of long-range van der Waals interactions both within the fluid…
Wetting and drying of a rigid substrate by a Lennard-Jones fluid in molecular dynamics simulations is reported. The size of the substrate particles, being smaller than the fluid particles in former simulations, is now taken to be equal to,…
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…