Fig. 3: Moderately lyophilic walls.
From: Manipulating wetting and pore filling by wall transparency
Average number densities inside the channel as functions of the channel width for the upper wall covered with a liquid and b vapor, respectively. The thickness of the upper wall is ℓw/R = 0.4, where R is the radius of the fluid particles. The filled symbols and solid lines (open symbols and dashed lines) correspond to stable (metastable) configurations. The black symbols and lines show the case of a thick wall. c Contact angle θ for various configurations 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 blue diamonds and orange pentagons correspond to channels filled with vapor and liquid, respectively, as in Fig. 2. The red squares correspond to a configuration with the channel filled with vapor, with the exception of the region underneath the droplet, which stabilizes the capillary liquid phase. The filled (open) symbols show the stable (metastable) configurations. The horizontal line indicates the reference contact angle θref ≈ 82° (no channel; see the dashed green vertical line in Fig. 1b). Results for ℓw/R = 2 are shown in Supplementary Fig. S4. d–f The same as (a–c) but plotted as functions of ℓw/R for channel width ℓc/R = 12. The vertical dashed line in (e) indicates the location of the capillary liquid-vapor transition. Such a transition is absent for the liquid coverage shown in (d).
