Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 224, 277–288 (2015)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2015-02359-1

Regular Article

Effect of contact angle hysteresis on breakage of a liquid bridge

¹ Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2G8, Canada
² Department of Mechanical Engineering, York University, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

^a e-mail: ttang1@ualberta.ca
^b e-mail: alidad2@yorku.ca

Received: 7 August 2014
Revised: 16 February 2015
Published online: 8 April 2015

Abstract

In this paper, the importance of considering contact angle hysteresis (CAH) during the process of stretching and breaking a liquid bridge between two solid surfaces is addressed. We clearly show that due to the pinning of contact line at the end of the stretching stage, the contact angle between liquid bridge and surfaces cannot be simply assumed to have a constant value (e.g. receding contact angle, θ_r). Simulation results for stretching a liquid bridge with and without CAH, showed that the contact line pinning can lead to breakage at a larger surface separation and smaller value of pull-off force (F_p). A systematic study about the effect of CAH and contact line pinning on the value of F_p is provided. It is found that when one of the surfaces has a θ_r larger than 90^∘, F_p decreases with the increase of θ_r on either surface delimiting the bridge. For the cases where θ_r of both surfaces are smaller than 90^∘, significantly smaller F_p is seen when contact line pinning occurs on both surfaces, as compared to F_p when contact line pinning occurs only on one surface. This smaller F_p is caused by more curved profile and later breakage of liquid bridge.