The Treatment of Capillary Rise

An approximate treatment of the phenomenon of capillary rise is easily made in terms of the Young-Laplace equation. If the liquid completely wets the wall of the capillary, the liquids surface is thereby constrained to lie parallel to the wall at the region of contact and the surface must be concave in shape. The 

Similarly, the identical expression holds for a liquid that completely fails to wet the capillary walls, where there will be an angle of contact between the liquid and the wall of 180°, a convex meniscus and a capillary depression of depth h. 

A slightly more general case is that in which the liquid meets the circularly cylindrical capillary wall at some angle 6, as illustrated in Fig. II-7. If the meniscus is still taken to be spherical in shape, it follows from simple geometric consideration that / 2 = r/cos 6 and, since R = / 2, Eq. II-9 then becomes 

---