Asia-Pacific Applied Topology and Geometry Seminar

Published in the Research School of Physics Event Horizon
Vol46 Issue47 29 November–3 December 2021

Abstract: Soft matter interfacial phenomena plays a central role in numerous natural and technological systems from subsurface engineering applications to microfluidics and fuel cells. We introduce a topological interpretation for the wetting state of fluids and derive general relationships that hold for any soft matter system. We show that topological relationships can be used to derive equilibrium contact angles and demonstrate that the approach succeeds for situations where the Young’s equation is invalid. We investigate that our developed concept can describe effective wetting behaviour in complex and confined domains, which links across various length scales pertinent to wetting phenomena. We link the topological description with thermodynamics and show that it captures effects due to dynamic contact angles, surface roughness and chemical heterogeneity at the pore to Darcy length scales. The approach is applied to interpret complex droplet dynamics that highlight the fundamental role of topology in wetting phenomena.

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