We study the time evolution of a sessile liquid droplet, which is initially put onto a solid surface in a nonequilibrium configuration and then evolves towards its equilibrium shape. We adapt here the standard approach to the dynamics of mechanical dissipative systems, in which the driving force, i.e., the gradient of the system’s Lagrangian function, is balanced against the rate of the dissipa...

The influence of interface porosity on the wetting properties of colloid-polymer mixtures is studied within density functional theory for the Asakura-Oosawa-Vrij model at the surface of a quenched hard-sphere matrix. While the porosity hardly changes the location of the transition from partial to complete wetting at colloidal bulk gas-liquid coexistence, the onset of wetting, as signaled by the...

When a liquid drop contacts a wettable surface, the liquid spreads over the solid to minimize the total surface energy. The first moments of spreading tend to be rapid. For example, a millimeter-sized water droplet will wet an area having the same diameter as the drop within a millisecond. For perfectly wetting systems, this spreading is inertially dominated. Here we identify that even in the p...

Measurements are presented of the state of wetting of a binary liquid mixture on heavily silylated glass, which are believed to probe a new region of the wetting phase diagram. We find unusual temperature dependence and the first experimental evidence of a possible "partial drying" transition recently predicted by Ebner and Saam for the case of strong short-range substrate-liquid forces opposed...

Trisiloxane surfactants also known as “superspreaders” are characterized by a critical wetting concentration (CWC) which has been determined by Svitova et al (Langmuir. 1998. 14, 50235031). CWC is a concentration above which a transition from partial wetting to complete wetting occurs at spreading over moderately hydrophobic surfaces, hence, the CWC is associated with the beginning of the super...

We investigate the formation of polymer vesicles, or polymersomes, of polystyrene-block-poly(ethylene oxide) diblock copolymers using double emulsion droplets of controlled architecture as templates. To engineer the structure of the polymersomes, it is important to consider the concentration of diblock copolymer in the middle phase of the double emulsion. We describe how the presence of excess ...

We show that wetting properties crucially control the patterns in two-phase flows of immiscible fluids in microchannels. Ordered patterns, continuously entrained by the flow, are obtained when one phase completely wets the walls, while disordered patterns, intermittently adhering to the channel walls, are unavoidably produced when wetting is partial. A lower limit for the channel sizes capable ...

We present a theoretical study of wetting phenomena and interactions between liquid–vapor interfaces based on the local density functional theory. The focus is mostly on the impact of longrange van der Waals interactions both within the fluid and between the fluid and substrate. For the latter, we consider two models – hard wall and soft wall approximations – differing by the role of steric eff...

Even a single-component liquid may have more than two liquid states. The transition between them is called a 'liquid-liquid transition' (LLT). Such LLTs have recently attracted considerable attention mainly because of the fundamental interest in the physical origin of this counter-intuitive phenomenon. In this study, we report the first observation of wetting effects on LLT for a molecular liqu...