Pinning-Depinning Mechanisms of the Contact Line during Evaporation of Microdroplets on Rough Surfaces: A Lattice Boltzmann Simulation

In this study, pinning and depinning of the contact line during droplet evaporation on the rough surfaces with randomly distributed structures is theoretically analyzed and numerically investigated. A fast Fourier transformation (FFT) method is used to generate the rough surfaces, whose skewness (Sk), kurtosis (K), and root-mean-square (Rq) are obtained from real surfaces. A thermal multiphase LB model is proposed to simulate the isothermal pinning and depinning processes. The evaporation processes are recorded with the variations in contact angle, contact radius, and drop shape. It is found that the drops sitting on rough surfaces show different behavior from those on smoother surfaces. The former shows a pinned contact line during almost the whole lifetime. By contrast, the latter experiences a stick-slip-jump behavior until the drop disappears. At mesoscopic scale, the pinning of the contact line is actually a slow motion rather than a complete immobilization at the sharp edges. The dynamic equilibrium is achieved by the self-adjustment of the contact line according to each edge.