Novel intermediate wetting behaviour

Wetting and spreading phenomena are areas of classical physics that have recently received renewed interest mainly because of their important industrial applications. Classically the wetting behaviour of a liquid on a solid is governed by the combination of interfacial tensions, denoted by the spreading power S. (S = γSV – γSL – γLV, is the difference between the energy of a dry solid and one covered by a macroscopic layer of liquid, with the indices referring to the interfacial tensions between the solid-vapour, solid-liquid and the liquid-vapour phases respectively.)