14 DAY TRIAL // Knowing how solid surfaces interact with liquids is often required in domains such as chemical industry or nanotechnology, but so far nobody succeeded to describe these interactions in simple mathematical formulas. Every time scientists tried to explain the phenomenon through experiments in this field, calculations became complicated and very technical.
Now, professor Andrew Parry, from the Imperial College of London's Department of Mathematics, claims to have obtained a simple formula to explain the relationship between a solid surface and a liquid, as one wets the other, including the fluctuation in the drop of liquid between the solid surface and the air sitting on top of the fluid, which is something never attempted by anyone before.
"Previous descriptions have all ignored or misrepresented these interactions and consequently were at odds with experimental results and computer simulations. The new formulation appears to explain all these outstanding problems in a very elegant manner," said Professor Parry. Wetting theories try to explain how a solid surface is completely wet by a liquid, much in the same way water flows over a body of glass.
Nevertheless, no matter how ideal the situation, a liquid would never completely wet a surface so that water droplets form on the surface. But, if the temperature of the environment is gradually increased, the liquid droplets would flatten until the whole surface of the solid material is wet. How this happens remained a subject of debate within the scientific community for more than two decades.
After working for the last four years on the problem, professor Parry seems to have found a solution to describe the processes that lead to a complete wetting of a surface. In his latest work, professor Parry proves that his wetting theory is correct, after previously describing, in other works, the mathematical model.