Spreading of Liquids on Solid Surfaces

Abstract

The spreading of a liquid on a solid conditions a large number of practical situations (metal anticorrosive coating, textile dying, paints, plant nutrition and treatments, lubrication, water imbibition of porous rocks, enhanced oil recovery….). In spite of their technical importance, these processes are not yet fully understood and indeed present a kind of challenge for both theorists and experimentalists: experimentally, all these processes are very sensitive to contamination by impurities which may adsorb preferentially on the solid interface and are difficult to control as the presence of the liquid does not allow the use of the sophisticated characterisation techniques developped for the solid-vacuum interfaces. Moreover, practical systems are often rather complicated, the liquid sometimes is a polymer or an emulsion while the solid can be finely divided (suspensions, porous media, fibers) implying additional drastic curvature effects. Theoretically, the problem of the moving contact line (3 phases: solid-liquid-gas boundary) is highly singular.