Drops of volatile binary mixtures on brush-covered substrates

Abstract

We introduce a mesoscopic hydrodynamic model for drops of binary mixtures of volatile partially wetting liquids on brush-covered substrates, i.e., we model the coupled dynamics of spreading, evaporation, imbibition, diffusion and partial demixing of the two volatile components across the three phases - brush, drop and gas. The formulation of the model as gradient dynamics on an underlying free energy functional allows us to systematically account for cross-couplings between the six scalar fields needed to describe the dynamics of both components within each of the three phases. The energy accounts for concentration- and brush state-dependent capillarity and wettability, miscibility of the two components within drop and brush, and entropy in the gas. Finally, the usage of the model is illustrated by employing numerical time simulations to study the dynamics of a sessile drop.