Spontaneous Breakdown of Superhydrophobicity

Abstract

In some cases water droplets can completely wet micro-structured superhydrophobic surfaces. The {\it dynamics} of this rapid process is analyzed by ultra-high-speed imaging. Depending on the scales of the micro-structure, the wetting fronts propagate smoothly and circularly or -- more interestingly -- in a {\it stepwise} manner, leading to a growing {\it square-shaped} wetted area: entering a new row perpendicular to the direction of front propagation takes milliseconds, whereas once this has happened, the row itself fills in microseconds ({\it ``zipping''})

Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (1)

• Mesoscopic modeling of a two-phase flow in the presence of boundaries: the Contact Angle

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Drop impact upon micro- and nanostructured superhydrophobic surfaces
• Evaporation-triggered Wetting Transition for Water Droplets upon Hydrophobic Microstructures
• How water droplets evaporate on a superhydrophobic substrate
• Quantifying effective slip length over micropatterned hydrophobic surfaces
• Impact forces of water drops falling on superhydrophobic surfaces
• The collapse transition on superhydrophobic surfaces
• Introduction: Localized Structures in Dissipative Media: From Optics to Plant Ecology
• Ternary Free Energy Lattice Boltzmann Model with Tunable Surface Tensions and Contact Angles
• Spontaneous Recovery of Superhydrophobicity on Nanotextured Surfaces
• Dynamics of the spontaneous breakdown of superhydrophobicity
• Regularization of the slip length divergence in water nanoflows by inhomogeneities at the Angstrom scale
• Imbibition through an array of triangular posts
• On the Modeling of Droplet Evaporation on Superhydrophobic Surfaces
• Fall and rise of small droplets on rough hydrophobic substrates
• The role of viscosity on drop impact forces on non-wetting surfaces
• Regimes of Wetting Transitions on Superhydrophobic Textures Conditioned by Energy of Receding Contact Lines
• Dynamics of nanodroplets on topographically structured substrates
• Geometric and chemical non-uniformity may induce the stability of more than one wetting state in the same hydrophobic surface
• Can one predict a drop contact angle?
• Hierarchical structured surfaces enhance the contact angle of the hydrophobic (meta-stable) state
• Modeling oil-water separation with controlled wetting properties
• Optimizing oil-water separation using fractal surfaces
• Probing wetting properties with self-propelled droplets
• Drop Impact on Two-Tier Monostable Superrepellent Surfaces