Water contact angles on charged surfaces in aerosols

Abstract

Interactions between water and solid substrates are of fundamental importance to various processes in nature and industry. Electric control is widely used to modify interfacial water, where the influence of surface charges is inevitable. Here we obtain positively and negatively charged surfaces using LiTaO3 crystals and observe that a large net surface charge up to 0.1 C/m2 can nominally change the contact angles of pure water droplets comparing to the same uncharged surface. However, even a small amount of surface charge can efficiently increase the water contact angle in the presence of aerosols. Our results indicate that such surface charges can hardly affect the structure of interfacial water molecular layers and the morphology of the macroscopic droplet, while adsorption of a small amount of organic contaminants from aerosols with the help of Coulomb attraction can notably decrease the wettability of solid surface. Our results not only provide a fundamental understanding of the interactions between charged surfaces and water, but also help to develop new techniques on electric control of wettability and microfluidics in real aerosol environments.