Scale
Dependence of Omniphobic Mesh Surfaces
By Shreerang
S. Chhatre, Wonjae Choi, Anish Tuteja,
Kyoo-Chul (Kenneth) Park, Joseph M. Mabry,Gareth H. McKinley, Robert E. Cohen
We provide a simple design chart
framework to predict the apparent contact angle on a textured surface in terms
of the equilibrium contact angle on a chemically identical smooth surface and
the details of the
surface topography. For low surface
tension liquids like methanol (γlv
= 22.7 mN/m) or octane (γlv
= 21.6 mN/m), a solid-liquid-air composite
interface on textured surface is inherently metastable.
Thus on application of a sufficient pressure difference (e.g. an
externally applied pressure or a sufficiently large Laplace pressure at small
droplet size) the metastable composite interface
transitions to a fully-wetted interface. A dimensionless robustness factor is
used to quantify the breakthrough pressure difference necessary to disrupt a metastable composite interface and to predict a priori the
existence of a robust composite interface. The impact of length scale (radius
of the cylindrical features R varying from 18 to 114 microns) and the
feature spacing ratio (D* =(R+D)/R varying from 2.2
to 5.1, where 2D is the spacing between the cylindrical features) on the
robustness is illustrated by performing contact angle measurements on a set of
dip-coated wire-mesh surfaces, which provide systematically quantifiable
cylindrical texture. The design chart for a
given feature size R shows how the two independent design parameters,
surface chemistry as revealed in the equilibrium contact angle and texture
spacing embodied
in the dimensionless spacing ratio
(D*), can be used to develop surfaces with desirably large values of apparent
contact angle and robustness of the metastable
composite interface. Most revealing is the
scaling of the robustness with the
dimensionless parameter which
indicates clearly why, in the consideration of self-similar surfaces, ‘smaller
is better’ for producing omniphobic surfaces that
resist wetting by liquids with low surface tension.