Effect of self-affine fractal characteristics of surfaces on wetting

Abstract

The relation between the contact angle of a liquid drop and the morphological parameters of self-affine solid surfaces have been investigated. We show experimentally that the wetting property of a solid surface crucially depends on the surface morphological parameters such as: (1) root mean square (rms) roughness $\sigma$, (2) in-plane roughness correlation length $\xi$ and (3) roughness exponent $\alpha$ of the self-affine surface. We have shown that the contact angle monotonically decreases with the increase in the rms local surface slope $\rho$ ($\propto \sigma/\xi^\alpha$) for the cases where the liquid wets the crevices of the surface upon contact. We have shown that the same solid surface can be made hydrophobic or hydrophilic by merely tuning these self-affine surface morphological parameters.