Dip-coating with prestructured substrates: transfer of simple liquids and Langmuir-Blodgett monolayers

TL;DR

This study investigates how striped prestructures on substrates influence the shape and dynamics of liquid menisci during dip-coating, with implications for transferring Langmuir-Blodgett monolayers and pattern formation.

Contribution

It introduces a thin film model accounting for wettability variations and demonstrates how substrate prestructures affect meniscus behavior and monolayer transfer patterns.

Findings

Prestructure stripes cause deformation and complex dynamics of the meniscus.

Parallel stripes lead to bent surfactant coverage patterns after transfer.

Modeling results align with experimental observations of pattern formation.

Abstract

When a plate is withdrawn from a liquid bath, either a static meniscus forms in the transition region between the bath and the substrate or a liquid film of finite thickness (a Landau-Levich film) is transferred onto the moving substrate. If the substrate is inhomogeneous, e.g., has a prestructure consisting of stripes of different wettabilities, the meniscus can be deformed or show a complex dynamic behavior. Here we study the free surface shape and dynamics of a dragged meniscus occurring for striped prestructures with two orientations, parallel and perpendicular to the transfer direction. A thin film model is employed that accounts for capillarity through a Laplace pressure and for the spatially varying wettability through a Derjaguin (or disjoining) pressure. Numerical continuation is used to obtain steady free surface profiles and corresponding bifurcation diagrams in the case of substrates with different homogeneous wettabilities. Direct numerical simulations are employed in the case of the various striped prestructures. The final part illustrates the importance of our findings for particular applications that involve complex liquids by modeling a Langmuir-Blodgett transfer experiment. There, one transfers a monolayer of an insoluble surfactant that covers the surface of the bath onto the moving substrate. The resulting pattern formation phenomena can be crucially influenced by the hydrodynamics of the liquid meniscus that itself depends on the prestructure on the substrate. In particular, we show how prestructure stripes parallel to the transfer direction lead to the formation of bent stripes in the surfactant coverage after transfer and present similar experimental results.