Geometric and chemical nonuniformity may induce the stability of more than one wetting state in the same hydrophobic surface

Abstract

It is well established that roughness and chemistry play a crucial role in the wetting properties of a substrate. Yet, few studies have analyzed systematically the effect of the nonuniformity in the distribution of texture and surface tension of substrates on its wetting properties. In this work we investigate this issue theoretically and numerically. We propose a continuous model that takes into account the total energy required to create interfaces of a droplet in two possible wetting states: Cassie-Baxter (CB) with air pockets trapped underneath the droplet; and the other characterized by the homogeneous wetting of the surface, called the Wenzel (W) state. To introduce geometrical nonregularity we suppose that pillar heights and pillar distances are Gaussian distributed instead of having a constant value. Similarly, we suppose a heterogeneous distribution of Young’s angle on the surface to take into account the chemical nonuniformity. This allows to vary the “amount” of disorder by changing the variance of the distribution. We first solve this model analytically and then we also propose a numerical version of it, which can be applied to study any type of disorder. In both versions, we employ the same physical idea: The energies of both states are minimized to predict the thermodynamic wetting state of the droplet for a given volume and surface texture. We find that the main effect of disorder is to induce the stability of both wetting states on the same substrate. In terms of the influence of the disorder on the contact angle of the droplet, we find that it is negligible for the chemical disorder and for pillar-distance disorder. However, in the case of pillar-height disorder, it is observed that the average contact angle of the droplet increases with the amount of disorder. We end the paper investigating how the region of stability of both wetting states behaves when the droplet volume changes.