Comment on "Solid-Liquid Work of Adhesion".

In a recent article, Tadmor and co-workers (Tadmor, R., et al. Langmuir 2017, 33, 3594-3600) used a centrifugal adhesion balance (CAB) to detach liquid drops from solid surfaces. By orienting solid surfaces in their CAB such that normal and lateral surfaces were balanced, the debonding force acted perpendicularly to the surface and drops detached by the axisymmetric retraction of their contact line. The detachment force was used to estimate the work of adhesion. To match the work of adhesion values from CAB to those calculated from the Young-Dupré equation, relatively large contact angles were required. Here, an alternative interpretation of their results is offered. Receding contact angles were estimated from their data and then used to predict the work of adhesion. These alternative predictions of the work of adhesion agreed with their estimates from the CAB.