Langmuir, Vol.18, No.9, 3549-3554, 2002
Wetting kinetics of fluorinated surfaces
A comparison has been made of the wetting properties of surfaces formed from bulk perfluorinated thermoplastics, from perfluorinated thermoplastic coatings, and from sol-gel coatings containing perfluoroalkyl chains. All surfaces showed hysteretic behavior, i.e., different advancing and receding contact angles, that was well-described by the Blake-Haynes meniscus-fluctuation theory of wetting kinetics over 2 orders of magnitude of advancing and receding meniscus velocities. The behavior at high wetting speed, and particularly the maximum three-phase contact line velocity, was better described by the Voinov-Cox-de Gennes theory involving viscosity. Best agreement with experiment over the whole range of meniscus velocities was found with the theory of Petrov, which takes both types of effects into account.