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Wetting behavior of water droplets on hydrophobic microtextures of comparable size
Jürgen Jopp1, Holger Grüll, Rachel Yerushalmi-Rozen
1The Ilse Katz Center for Meso- and Nanoscale Science and Technology and the Department of Chemical Engineering, Ben Gurion University in the Negev, 84105 Beer Sheva, Israel.
Abstract:
The wetting behavior of water droplets on periodically structured hydrophobic surfaces was investigated. The effect of structure geometry, roughness, and relative pore fraction on the contact angles was investigated experimentally for droplets of size comparable to the size of the structures. It was found that surface geometry may induce a transition from groove-filling and Wenzel-like behavior to nonfilling of surface grooves and consequential Cassie-Baxter behavior. Numerical calculations of the free energy of these systems suggest that the equilibrium behavior is in line with the experimental observations. The observations may serve as guidelines for the design of surfaces with the desired wetting behavior.
