Equilibrium Contact Angle at the Wetted Substrate

Abstract

We construct a novel model for the steady-state contact angles of liquid droplets at the wetted substrate. The non-removable, thin liquid film covering the substrate is governed by the intermolecular forces between molecules of liquid and solid, which we describe using the standard disjoining pressure approximation. Balancing the disjoining pressure against the surface tension we find the smooth shape of the surface of the liquid. We show that we can extract an effective contact angle from the region where the film and the droplet meet. Crucially, we find that for large droplets the contact angle is independent of the droplet size. Instead, the contact angle is determined by the surface tension and the disjoining pressure parameters through a simple formula that works for both small and large contact angles. We suggest that comparing predictions of our model to experimentally measured contact angles will enable constraining the parameters of the disjoining pressure models.

arXiv comment10 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Hydrodynamic theory of de-wetting
• Toward a description of contact line motion at higher capillary numbers
• Asymptotic theory for a moving droplet driven by a wettability gradient
• Contact line motion for partially wetting fluids
• A volume of fluid method for simulating fluid/fluid interfaces in contact with solid boundaries
• A numerical approach for the direct computation of flows including fluid-solid interaction: modeling contact angle, film rupture, and dewetting
• Perturbation Theory for Traveling Droplets