New Method Developed to Measure Contact Angles of a Sessile Drop

The spreading of an evaporating liquid on a solid surface occurs in many practical processes and is of importance in a number of practical situations such as painting, textile dyeing, coating, gluing, and thermal engineering. Typical processes involving heat transfer where the contact angle plays an important role are film cooling, boiling, and the heat transfer through heat pipes. The biological phenomenon of cell spreading also is analogous to a drop spreading (ref. 1). In the study of spreading, the dynamic contact angle describes the interfacial properties on solid substrates and, therefore, has been studied by physicists and fluid mechanics investigators. The dynamic contact angle of a spreading nonvolatile liquid drop provides a simple tool in the study of the free-boundary problem, but the study of the spreading of a volatile liquid drop is of more practical interest because the evaporation of common liquids is inevitable in practical processes. The most common method to measure the contact angle, the contact radius, and the height of a sessile drop on a solid surface is to view the drop from its edge through an optical microscope. However, this method gives only local information in the view direction. Zhang and Yang (ref. 2) developed a laser shadowgraphy method to investigate the evaporation of sessile drop on a glass plate. As described here, Zhang and Chao (refs. 3 and 4) improved the method and suggested a new optical arrangement to measure the dynamic contact angle and the instant evaporation rate of a sessile drop with much higher accuracy (less than 1 percent). With this method, any fluid motion in the evaporating drop can be visualized through shadowgraphy without using a tracer, which often affects the field under investigation.