Wetting characterisation on complex surfaces by an automatic open-source tool: DropenVideo.

HYPOTHESIS

Investigating solid-liquid interactions to determine advancing and receding contact angles, and consequently contact angle hysteresis, is crucial for understanding material wetting properties. A reliable, automated, and possibly open-source tool is desirable, to standardize and automatize the measurement and make it user-independent.

EXPERIMENTS

This study introduces an open-source software, DropenVideo, as an extension of Dropen. DropenVideo automates frame-by-frame video analysis for the advancing and receding contact angle determination, by considering needle presence, contrast tuning, and compensating for missing drop edge data. Contact angles are calculated using convolution mask, circle, and polynomial fittings. An innovative feature in DropenVideo is the automatic protocol for identifying advancing and receding contact angles: (i) the advancing contact angle is determined as the average value during drop inflation; and (ii) the receding contact angle is determined from the frame of incipient motion during drop deflation.

FINDINGS

Exploring the application of DropenVideo across a range of complex surfaces as representative test cases, we highlight existing challenges in interpreting wetting measurements by addressing different wetting scenarios. Our study demonstrates that employing frame-by-frame automatic analysis of contact angle measurement videos using DropenVideo significantly mitigates the potential risks of subjective bias associated with manual interpretation and enhances the precision of identified wetting characteristics.