Computational Analysis of Wetting on Hydrophobic Surfaces Application to Self-Cleaning Mechanisms

Keywords Self-cleaning mechanism, contact angle, static wetting, nonlinear finite element analysis, droplet membranes. 

Mittal (ed.) Advances in Contact Angle, Wettabilty and Adhesion Volume 2. (129-147) 2015 Scrivener Publishing LLC 

This paper is organized as follows Section 5.2 provides a brief overview on the basic definitions used in differential geometry, on which the droplet membrane model is based. Then the model describing a self-cleaning system is illustrated in Section 5.3, where the following individual sub-models are introduced the droplet model, the substrate surface model, and the model discussing the particle-droplet interaction. The governing equations of these models are presented in Section 5.4, followed by the force analysis for the last model performed in Section 5.5. Numerical examples are shown in Section 5.6 in order to clarify the theory. In the end, we outline the summary of the presented work in Section 5.7. 

These tangents are generally non-orthogonal and are not normalized. Greek indices take values in 1,2, and repeated indices are summed according to index notation. Equation (5.1) defines the basis for the tangent plane at X, which is characterized by the metric tensor 

The contra-variant pair of tangent vectors can be defined in terms of 

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Computational Analysis of Wetting on Hydrophobic Surfaces Application to Self-Cleaning Mechanisms... 

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