Contact angle measurement on curved wetting surface in multiphase lattice Boltzmann method

Abstract: Contact angle is an essential physical quantity that characterizes the wettability of a substrate. Although it is widely used in the studies of surface wetting, capillary phenomena and moving contact lines, measuring contact angles in experiments and simulations is still complicated and time-consuming. In this paper, we present an efficient scheme for the real-time and on-the-spot measurement of contact angles on curved wetting surfaces in lattice Boltzmann simulations. The measuring results are in excellent agreement with the theoretical predictions by the spherical cap method without considering the gravity effect. A series of the simulations with various drop sizes and surface curvatures confirm that the present scheme is grid-independent. Then, it is verified in gravitational environments by simulating the deformations of sessile and pendent droplets on the curved wetting surface. The numerical results are highly consistent with experimental observations and support the theoretical analysis that the microscopic contact angle is independent of gravity. Furthermore, the scheme is applied to capture the dynamic contact angle hysteresis on homogeneous or chemically heterogeneous curved surfaces. Importantly, the accurate contact angle measurement enables the mechanical analysis at moving contact lines. The present measurement is simple and efficient, and can be extended to implement in various multiphase lattice Boltzmann models.