TITLE:
Simulation of Hydrophobicity Evaluation and Structural Optimization Design Method for Micro-Array Units
AUTHORS:
Yang Shen, Ge Guo, Yafeng Zhang, Yuan Lu, Xin Wang
KEYWORDS:
Hydrophobic Materials, Micro-Array, Laminar Two-Phase Flow, Horizontal-Set Method, COMSOL
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Surface Engineered Materials and Advanced Technology,
Vol.8 No.2,
April
25,
2018
ABSTRACT: In recent years, researches published on hydrophobic materials increase rapidly, wherein the method for changing hydrophobicity by modifying a micro-array structure on the surface of the material also has been proposed. Of course, if it is possible for us to quantitatively analyse and evaluate hydrophobicity of different structures of one certain material at first, this task will greatly optimize the design of actual structures. In this work, we used the algorithm for Laminar Two-Phase Flow, Horizontal-set method integrated in COMSOL to build two single-pore simulation structures in different shapes and simulated the behaviour of the liquid transition from Cassie-state to Wenzel-state during the impregnation process. After that, the intrinsic contact angle of Structure T (a porous structure with a T-shaped sectional profile) was obtained under a certain pressure which maintained liquids in Cassie-state. Meanwhile, two equilibrium states of the liquid-air interface as well as two different patterns of the equilibrium state disrupting were found in Structure R (a porous structure with a Chamfered T-shaped sectional profile). Simulation results show that the modelling method can be applied for simulating the hydrophobicity of different porous structures and optimizing the procedures for the design of the micro-array efficiently.