WETTING TRANSITIONS IN A CYLINDRICAL PORE

The wetting behavior of two-phase systems confined inside cylindrical pores is studied theoretically. The confined geometry gives rise to wetting configurations, or microstructures, which have no analog in the well-studied planar case. Many features observed in experiments on binary liquid mixtures in porous media, previously interpreted in terms of random fields, are shown to be consistent with wetting in a confined geometry with no randomness. © 1990 The American Physical Society.