Kinetic analysis of wetting and spreading at high temperatures: A review

The kinetic factors of the liquid-solid interface formation process are extremely useful in the design of composite preparation methods and the manufacture of comprehensive performance-controlled metal- or ceramic-based composites. Here, we review the available spreading dynamic models, focusing on wetting at high temperatures. There is yet to be developed a general spreading dynamic model with complete physical meaning that can accurately describe complicated surface-interface kinetic processes at high temperatures. In this work, we highlight common analysis errors in the description of the spreading dynamics for metal-ceramic and metal-metal systems. By unifying the expressions of the spreading dynamic models as the function f(v, θ_d) and fitting the experimental data reported in the literature, we discovered that the molecular-kinetic model commonly used to describe adsorption-controlled spreading at room temperature and reaction-limited spreading model used at high temperature have a certain range of overlap. When the condition σ_lv(cosθ_e-cosθ_d) < <2nk_BT is satisfied, these models are consistent in terms of mathematical functional expressions. As a result, distinguishing between them when the spreading behavior includes both adsorption and reaction is challenging.