Wetting of Curved Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates the microscopic wetting behavior of fluids on curved surfaces like spheres and fibers using density functional theory, accounting for long-range interactions to understand wetting film properties and phase diagrams.

Contribution

It introduces a density functional approach that incorporates power-law decay of interactions for analyzing wetting on curved surfaces, advancing previous models.

Findings

Wetting film thickness varies with temperature and chemical potential.

Wetting phase diagrams are mapped for different conditions.

The approach improves understanding of microscopic wetting phenomena on curved geometries.

Abstract

As a first step towards a microscopic understanding of the effective interaction between colloidal particles suspended in a solvent we study the wetting behavior of one-component fluids at spheres and fibers. We describe these phenomena within density functional theory which keeps track of the microscopic interaction potentials governing these systems. In particular we properly take into account the power-law decay of both the fluid-fluid interaction potentials and the substrate potentials. The thicknesses of the wetting films as a function of temperature and chemical potential as well as the wetting phase diagrams are determined by minimizing an effective interface potential which we obtain by applying a sharp-kink approximation to the density functional. We compare our results with previous approaches to this problem.