Science / Technology - Colloquium
Monday, December 11, 2006
4:00 PM-5:00 PM
Olin Hall
107
Despite the fact that during the last century there has been a lot of research into wetting and the properties of liquids, many things are not known and discoveries, potentially of great importance to science, technology and society, continue to be made about how, why and when liquids wet solid surfaces. During the last 20 years, we have seen the discovery of thermodynamic Casimir effects, triple point wetting, prewetting and critical wetting, to name a few. The wetting of a liquid droplet on a solid surface is universally characterized by its contact angle, the angle between the liquid surface and the solid surface. For a liquid which completely wets a surface (contact angle of zero), the wetting is characterized by the thickness of the adsorbed film. New experimental research at WPI is focused on discovering the principles necessary for predicting how the wetting of polar liquids and liquid crystals changes as we vary the temperature. Being investigated are water, nitrous oxide and the cigar-shaped n-alkylcyanobisphenyl liquid crystals. Despite the ordinary nature of these materials, preliminary data demonstrate a variety of extraordinary behaviors not anticipated by theory. Our goal is to try to confirm and understand these phenomena within the framework of Cheng-Cole-Saam-Treiner approximation for the difference between the liquid-solid and gas-solid surface tensions.
Cost: FREE
Sponsored by: WPI Physics Department, Dr. Rafael Garcia
Suggested Audiences: College
E-mail:
snj@wpi.edu
Phone: 508-831-5322
Last Modified: December 7, 2006 at 1:38 PM
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