The interaction of inner and outer surface corners during spontaneous wetting

Abstract

Real world surfaces can often be modeled as a collection of edges, corners, dents or spikes of varying roundness. These features exhibit individual spontaneous wetting behaviors comprising pinned contact lines, rivulets or cusps. If occurring in proximity to one another, as is often the case in applications, these wetting properties interact, resulting in an overall changed wetting pattern on the surface. Hence, there is considerable interest in understanding when, and to what extent, interactions occur, and how wetting then deviates from the wetting of isolated surface features. The present study addresses these questions by experimentally and theoretically studying the capillary interaction of sharp-edged 90{\deg} (outer) and 270{\deg} (inner) corners in proximity to one another. It is shown that the spontaneous wetting at the convex outer corner is in uenced by the concave inner corner even when they are separated by a distance of several times the capillary length, while the wetting of the inner corner takes place unaffected by the outer corner, except when the separating distance is much smaller than the capillary length. The final contact line shape at the inner corner is measured and theoretically modelled for contact angles up to 90{\deg}.