Rewetting phenomena and their relation to intermolecular forces between a hot wall and the fluid

The rewetting phenomena and the different physical concepts which are used in their modelisation are reviewed. The present work studies the effect of the intermolecular forces between the hot wall and the fluid on this phase transition. Using suitable approximations, a local equation of state is obtained by the treatment of the fluid-fluid and fluid-wall intermolecular interactions. This local equation of state depends on the distance from the wall, and the critical pressure and temperature become a function of the distance from the wall, whereas the critical density is left constant throughout the fluid. At the wall, the critical pressure and temperature are half their bulk values and increase towards the bulk value as the distance from the wall increases. The penetration of a temperature profile in this fluid is studied by assuming that the liquid density is not strongly affected by this temperature profile as long as there is no phase transition. It is shown that the phase transition will occur extremely rapidly when the interfacial temperature upon contact is higher than the minimum of the local spinodal temperature, which varies with the distance from the wall. The result ist cast in the form of an interfacial rewetting temperature fTc above which rewetting of the surface by liquid-wall contacts is not expected because these contacts will be terminated in extremely short times. Comparing the theory with available data shows that in the usual rewetting situations the theory reduces to the use of the bulk spinodal temperature. For surfaces coated with poorly wetted materials the correction factor due to surface effects applies, reducing the rewetting temperature, in agreement with the experimental data. For liquid metals it appears that the theory is applied in a region where the basic theoretical approximations are very coarse; but even in that case the experimental trend is qualitatively predicted by the theory. (author) 43 figs., 11 tabs., 105 refs