Critical Drying of Liquids

Superhydrophobic surfaces have drawn a lot of interest both in academia and in industry because of the self-cleaning properties. This critical review focuses on the recent progress (within the last three years) in the preparation, theoretical modeling, and applications of superhydrophobic surfaces. The preparation approaches are reviewed according to categorized approaches such as bottom-up, top-down, and combination approaches. The advantages and limitations of each strategy are summarized and compared. Progress in theoretical modeling of surface design and wettability behavior focuses on the transition state of superhydrophobic surfaces and the role of the roughness factor. Finally, the problems/obstacles related to applicability of superhydrophobic surfaces in real life are addressed. This review should be of interest to students and scientists interested specifically in superhydrophobic surfaces but also to scientists and industries focused in material chemistry in general.

Relying on the recently proposed multicanonical algorithm, we present a numerical simulation of the first order phase transition in the 2d 10-state Potts model on lattices up to sizes \(100\times100\). It is demonstrated that the new algorithm \(lacks\) an exponentially fast increase of the tunneling time between metastable states as a function of the linear size \(L\) of the system. Instead, the tunneling time diverges approximately proportional to \(L^{2.65}\). Thus the computational effort as counted per degree of freedom for generating an independent configuration in the unstable region of the model rises proportional to \(V^{2.3}\), where \(V\) is the volume of the system. On our largest lattice we gain more than two orders of magnitude as compared to a standard heat bath algorithm. As a first physical application we report a high precision computation of the interfacial tension.