2012/03/23 by Stephan Herminghaus, Herminghaus, Stephan
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Adhesion, Friction, and Surface Interactions #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Properties and Processing #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1203.5215
openalex publication_date 2012/03/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The wetting properties of solid substrates with macroscopic random roughness are considered as a function of the microscopic contact angle of the wetting liquid and its partial pressure in the surrounding gas phase. It is shown that Wenzel prewetting, which has been recently predicted for a rather wide class of roughness profiles derived from Gaussian random processes by a general distortion procedure, should in fact be ubiquitous and prevail under even much milder conditions. The well-known transition occurring at Wenzel's angle is accompanied by a prewetting transition, at which a jump in the adsorbed liquid volume occurs. This should be present on most surfaces bearing homogeneous, isotropic random roughness.