Liquid-solid interactions, as never before seen
Wettability — the degree to which a liquid either spreads out over a surface or forms into droplets — is crucial to a wide variety of processes. It influences, for example, how easily a car’s windshield fogs up, and also affects the functioning of advanced batteries and fuel-cell systems. Until now, the only way to quantify this important characteristic of a material’s surface has been to measure the shapes of the droplets that form on it, and this method has very limited resolution. But a team of MIT researchers has found a way to obtain images that improves the resolution of such measurements by a factor of 10,000 or more, allowing for unprecedented precision in determining the details of the interactions between liquids and solid surfaces. In addition, the new method can be used to study curved, textured or complex solid surfaces, something that could not be done previously.“This is...