Abstract(s) :

(Anglais) During this talk, I will review some very recent results about the dynamics of wetting. We have indeed shown that the thermal fluctuations of the three-phase contact line formed between a liquid and a solid at equilibrium can be used to determine key parameters that control dynamic wetting. To validate this approach, We use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations and Lennard-Jones potentials to model a liquid bridge between two molecularly smooth solid surfaces and study the positional fluctuations of the contact lines so formed as a function of the solid–liquid interaction. Within this approach, we show that the fluctuations have a Gaussian distribution and may be modelled as an overdamped one-dimensional Langevin oscillator. Our results suggest that it should be possible to predict the dynamics of wetting and, in particular, the velocity-dependence of the local, microscopic dynamic contact angle, by experimentally measuring the fluctuations of the contact line of a capillary system at equilibrium. This would circumvent the need to measure the microscopic dynamic contact angle directly.