Fig. 2: Lyophobic walls.
From: Manipulating wetting and pore filling by wall transparency
Number density profiles for three values of the channel width ℓc with a liquid and b vapor covering the outside of the upper wall of the channel (Fig. 1a). Here the left plots show the densities inside the channel with the position expressed in terms of ℓc. The right plots show the densities outside the channel above its upper wall, with the distance from the wall measured in units of the radius R of the fluid particles. The fluid density vanishes in the gray depletion zone. Filling of the channel by liquid is metastable in all cases. The wall thickness is ℓw/R = 0.4. c Average fluid number density \({\bar{\rho }}_{{{{\rm{c}}}}}\) inside the channel as a function of the channel width ℓc for a thick wall (ℓw → ∞) and for ℓw/R = 0.4 in the case of coverage by liquid or vapor. In all plots and throughout the paper, the filled symbols and solid lines (open symbols and dashed lines) correspond to stable (metastable) configurations. The lines associated with metastable configurations end once they cease to exist. The various colored arrows indicate the values of ℓc/R and \({\bar{\eta }}_{c}\) corresponding to the profiles shown in (a, b) with the same color code. d Contact angle θ for channels filled with liquid and vapor, as illustrated by the droplet cartoons (for visualization purposes only). The contact angles were computed from the surface tensions of the corresponding configurations according to Eq. (1). The horizontal line indicates the reference contact angle θref ≈ 133. 6° (no channel; see the dashed red vertical line in Fig. 1b). e, f The same quantity as in (c, d) but as functions of wall thickness ℓw for a channel of width ℓc/R = 12.
