Self-similarity of contact line depinning from textured surfaces
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Paxson_2013-Self-similarity of contact.pdf
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3.75 MB
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Author(s)
Paxson, Adam T.
Varanasi, Kripa K.
Date Issued
February 2013
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Paxson, Adam T., and Kripa K. Varanasi. “Self-similarity of contact line depinning from textured surfaces.” Nature Communications 4 (February 19, 2013): 1492. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The mobility of drops on surfaces is important in many biological and industrial processes, but the phenomena governing their adhesion, which is dictated by the morphology of the three-phase contact line, remain unclear. Here we describe a technique for measuring the dynamic behaviour of the three-phase contact line at micron length scales using environmental scanning electron microscopy. We examine a superhydrophobic surface on which a drop’s adhesion is governed by capillary bridges at the receding contact line. We measure the microscale receding contact angle of each bridge and show that the Gibbs criterion is satisfied at the microscale. We reveal a hitherto unknown self-similar depinning mechanism that shows how some hierarchical textures such as lotus leaves lead to reduced pinning, and counter-intuitively, how some lead to increased pinning. We develop a model to predict adhesion force and experimentally verify the model’s broad applicability on both synthetic and natural textured surfaces.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2482
