The chemical industries and new nanotechnologies are named to benefit from a new mathematical formula that tackles the relationship between liquid and the shape of a surface that gets wet.
Published recently in Physical Review Letters, the simple formula explains how the liquid and surface change as one wets the other. Professor Andrew Parry from Imperial College London's Department of Mathematics, author of the new paper, has devised and tested a new way to explain this process. His formula takes into account fluctuations in the drop of liquid between the solid surface it sits on and the air above it, which have not been included in any previous formula.
"Previous descriptions have all ignored or misrepresented these interactions and consequently were at odds with experimental results and computer simulations. The new formulation appears to explain all these outstanding problems in a very elegant manner," said Professor Parry.
Wetting surfaces is a key consideration in many applications including oil recovery, the way pesticide is deposited on plant leaves and inkjet printing.
Professor Parry has been working on this problem for four years, and this paper is the final one in a series of three publications addressing it.
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Date Published: April 09, 2008
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