Impalement of fakir drops

By Sung Hoon Kang

---

Title: Impalement of fakir drops

Reference: M. Reyssat, J. M. Yeomans, and D. Quere, Europhys. Lett. 81, 26006 (2008).

Soft matter keywords

hydrophobicity, fakir state, impalement, surface energy, contact angle

Abstract from the original paper

Water drops deposited on hydrophobic materials decorated with dilute micro-posts generally form pearls. Owing to the hydrophobicity of the material, the drop sits on the top of the posts. However, this “fakir state” is often metastable: if the drop impales inside the texture, its surface energy is lowered. Here we discuss the transition between these two states, considering the drop size as a parameter for inducing this transition: remarkably, it is found that a drop impales when it becomes small, which is interpreted by considering its curvature. This interpretation allows us to propose different recipes for avoiding this detrimental effect.

Soft matter example

In this paper, the authors used hydrophobic surface with regular arrays of micropillars for studying the transition between "fakir state" and "impaled state" as a function of the drop size. They fabricated samples with controlled geometry and coated with a fluropolymer. The contact angle for water on a flat surface was between 100-110° while it was ~160° for a surface with texture.

Fig. 1. Evaporation of a water drop sitting on a hydrophobic surface decorated with pillars (visible in the photos) of diameter d = 3 μm, height h = 4.8 μm and distance l = 17 μm. The initial radius is 120 μm, and the time interval between two successive photos is 5 s. As the drop radius reaches 75 μm (fifth snapshot), the state of the drop abruptly changes, from a super-hydrophobic state to a hydrophilic-like one.

Figure 1 shows the images of a water drop evaporating on a sample with the micropillars of diameter = 3um, height = 4.8 um and mutual distance of 17 um. During a first stage (first five snapshots), the contact angle remained constant as the drop evaporated at a receding angle of 138±3° and the advancing one of 165±2°. However, when the drop becomes smaller than a critical radius R* of 75 um, the angle became much smaller by about 80° and it continued decreasing: the liquid was very efficiently pinned and the receding angle gradually vanished to zero even though the material was hydrophobic. The authors argued that this phenomenon could be resulted from an impalement of the drop in the texture and they confirmed their interpretation by examining the trace left on the material after evaporation as shown in Fig 2. As shown in Fig. 2., a circular stain was observed at the bottom state of the solid, where it followed the pillars where pinning happened, indicating the drop sank insdie the texture.

Fig. 2. Trace left after drop evaporation in the experiment of Fig. 1. A stain resulting from the evaporation-driven flow of dust present in water is clearly visible at the bottom stage of the textured material. The stain follows the pillars, showing that the drop sank inside the texture, and then got pinned on the microstructures. The bar indicates 50 μm.