The effect of temperature on contact angles and wetting transitions for n-alkanes on PTFE.

The aim of this paper is to present a method for predicting the effect of temperature on contact angles and wetting transitions for n-alkanes on PTFE. The analysis is based on the effect of temperature on two closely related phenomena, which are critical in the determination of contact angles: intermolecular forces and the thickness of an adsorbed film in the region adjacent to the three-phase contact. Considering solely van der Waals forces, it is possible to reproduce the experimental temperature dependence of contact angles. At low temperature values, contact angles show a small and linear decrease with temperature. For higher temperature values, substantially larger decreases are exhibited by the more volatile alkanes. In the case of n-octane, a single transition from partial to total wetting is found at 443K. This transition, which arises from the vanishing of the effective Hamaker constant at 430K, is characterized by a surface specific heat exponent close to one, indicating the existence of a first order wetting transition. For the less volatile alkanes, the contact angle decrease is progressively less pronounced as the volatility decreases in such a way that for n-hexadecane the contact angle remains approximately constant throughout the temperature range under study.