Thermally activated depinning motion of contact lines in pseudopartial wetting

We investigate pressure-driven motion of liquid-liquid menisci in circular tubes, for systems in pseudopartial wetting conditions. The originality of this type of wetting lies in the coexistence of a macroscopic contact angle with a wetting liquid film covering the solid surface. Focusing on small capillary numbers, we report observations of an apparent contact angle hysteresis at first sight similar to the standard partial wetting case. However, this apparent hysteresis exhibits original features. We observe very long transient regimes before steady state, up to several hundreds of seconds. Furthermore, in steady state, the velocities are nonzero, meaning that the contact line is not strongly pinned to the surface defects, but are very small. The velocity of the contact line tends to vanish near the equilibrium contact angle. These observations are consistent with the thermally activated depinning theory that has been proposed to describe partial wetting systems on disordered substrates and suggest that a single physical mechanism controls both the hysteresis (or the pinning) and the motion of the contact line. The proposed analysis leads to the conclusion that the depinning activated energy is lower with pseudopartial wetting systems than with partial wetting ones, allowing the direct observation of the thermally activated motion of the contact line.