Surface Innovations, the journal
A new paper was published in the Surface Innovations journal by our team. The title of the paper is “Hydrophobic nano-asperities in control of energy barrier during particle-surface interactions” and is co-authored by J. Drelich and P.K. Bowen. The paper presents a theoretical analysis of colloidal interactions between rough spherical particles and flat surfaces and is based on extended – DLVO model adopted by the authors to such system geometry.
It is shown that hydrophobic asperities with the radius of only a few nanometers reduce the energy required for particle attachment to a hydrophobic surface by several times. The value of this energy barrier is reduced by as much as two orders of magnitude when the radius of nano-sized asperities increases to a few tens of nanometers. Theoretical analysis presented also reveals that surface coverage of microscopic particles by nano-sized asperities is not as important as the size of the asperities.
