Dependence of the Liquid Polarity in the Wetting of Rough Surface: An Effective Surface Tension Approach

Liquid and surface polarities play an important role in wetting phenomena, and this should still be true if the surface is rough. We analyze the wetting of high-polar and low-polar liquids on rough low-polar surfaces made of polystyrene. The experimental results are analyzed by the surface tension components (STC) and the equation-of-state (EQS) approaches. Both approaches predicted a clear increase of the contact angle (CA) with the surface roughness for high-polar liquids, but they failed for low-polar liquids: STC calculations produce the wrong tendency in the total solid surface energy, and EQS is not able to fit the data for these liquids. These results show that low-polar liquids show little dependence on the roughness of a low-polar surface, while high-polar liquids are very sensitive to it. As a consequence, the calculated CAs are close to experimental values only for the high-polar liquids, while there are great differences for low-polarity liquids. Both STC and EQS approaches are able to describe the apparent CAs on polystyrene rough surfaces by using effective surface and interfacial tensions, but their effectiveness is limited to high-polarity liquids.