Modeling Cassie–Baxter State on Superhydrophobic Surfaces

The goal of this work is to study the Cassie–Baxter state on the microstructure hydrophobic surfaces. The dependence of the energy barrier on the drop size, contact angle, the gap between the pillars, and pillar width is investigated. We consider the drop in three dimensions using a numerical approach to minimize the free energy of the drop in any situations. Numerical results are obtained for the wetting of a hydrophobic surface textured with a square lattice of pillars. According to the results, we found that the curvature increases allowing the liquid to touch the surface below the posts as the drop loses volume or decreased the contact angle with fixed drop volume. In the situations we considered, the pillar diagonal length is very critical and sensitive to the details of the surface patterning when the drop volume is larger.