Wettability transparency and the quasiuniversal relationship between hydrodynamic slip and contact angle

B Ramos-Alvarado and S Kumar and GP Peterson, APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS, 108, 074105 (2016).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4942400

The universality of the scaling laws that correlate the hydrodynamic slip length and static contact angle was investigated by introducing the concept of the wettability transparency of graphene-coated surfaces. Equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of droplet wettability for Si(111), Si(100), and graphene-coated silicon surfaces were performed to determine the conditions required to obtain similar contact angles between bare and graphene-coated surfaces (wettability transparency). The hydrodynamic slip length was determined by means of equilibrium calculations for silicon and graphene-coated silicon nanochannels. The results indicate that the slip-wettability scaling laws can be used to describe the slip behavior of the bare silicon nanochannels in general terms; however, clear departures from a general universal description were observed for hydrophobic conditions. In addition, a significant difference in the hydrodynamic slippage was observed under wettability transparency conditions. Alternatively, the hydrodynamic boundary condition for silicon and graphene-coated silicon nanochannels was more accurately predicted by observing the density depletion length, posing this parameter as a better alternative than the contact angle to correlate with the slip length. (C) 2016 AIP Publishing LLC.

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