Effective boundary conditions for dynamic contact angle hysteresis on chemically inhomogeneous surfaces

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical model for the averaged dynamic contact angles on chemically patterned surfaces, providing explicit formulas that relate contact angles to substrate inhomogeneity and velocity, validated by numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a Cox-type boundary condition for inhomogeneous surfaces and derives a quantitative formula for dynamic contact angles considering chemical patterns.

Findings

The derived formula accurately predicts contact angle hysteresis behavior.

Numerical simulations confirm the validity of the analytical model.

The model links contact angles to substrate inhomogeneity and motion velocity.

Abstract

Recent experiments (Guan et al. 2016a,b) showed many interesting phenomena on dynamic contact angle hysteresis while there is still a lack of complete theoretical interpretation. In this work, we study the time averaging of the apparent advancing and receding contact angles on surfaces with periodic chemical patterns. We first derive a Cox-type boundary condition for the apparent dynamic contact angle on homogeneous surfaces using Onsager variational principle. Based on this condition, we propose a reduced model for some typical moving contact line problems on chemically inhomogeneous surfaces in two dimensions. Multiscale expansion and averaging techniques are employed to approximate the model for asymptotically small chemical patterns. We obtain a quantitative formula for the averaged dynamic contact angles. It gives explicitly how the advancing and receding contact angles depend on the velocity and the chemical inhomogeneity of the substrate. The formula is a coarse-graining version of the Cox-type boundary condition on inhomogeneous surfaces. Numerical simulations are presented to validate the analytical results. The numerical results also show that the formula characterizes very well the complicated behaviour of dynamic contact angle hysteresis observed in the experiments.