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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 15, 2025

Fabrication of Carbon-Based Ionic Electromechanically Active Soft Actuators

Fabrication of Carbon-Based Ionic Electromechanically Active Soft Actuators

Published on: April 25, 2020

Chemically active wetting.

Susanne Liese¹, Xueping Zhao², Christoph A Weber¹

¹Faculty of Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Materials Engineering, and Institute of Physics, University of Augsburg, Augsburg 86159, Germany.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

|April 9, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Chemically active wetting, driven by nonequilibrium binding processes, alters droplet shapes on surfaces. This new understanding of active systems reveals anomalous states like pancakes or mushrooms, with implications for cellular biology.

Keywords:

nonequilibrium thermodynamics phase separation wetting

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Area of Science:

Physics
Chemistry
Biophysics

Background:

Wetting phenomena on passive surfaces are well-understood.
Governing laws for active surfaces, however, remain elusive.
Active surfaces introduce complexity beyond equilibrium thermodynamics.

Purpose of the Study:

To propose and theoretically describe chemically active wetting.
To establish a nonequilibrium thermodynamic framework for active wetting.
To explain anomalous droplet shapes on active surfaces.

Main Methods:

Derivation of a nonequilibrium thermodynamic theory for active wetting.
Analysis of droplet shapes resulting from active binding processes.
Mapping active wetting phenomena to electrostatic analogies.

Main Results:

Active binding fundamentally alters wetting behavior.
Steady, nonequilibrium states with anomalous droplet shapes (pancake, mushroom) are predicted.
Localized chemical activity generates multipole fields of chemical potential.

Conclusions:

Chemically active wetting represents a new class of active systems.
The derived theory explains emergent droplet morphologies.
The physics is relevant to biological processes involving protein-membrane interactions and fuel turnover.