Viscoelasticity and Kinetics of Wetting on Rubber

The kinetics of spreading of a liquid drop is usually controlled by conversion of capillary potential energy into viscous dissipation within the liquid when the solid is rigid. However, if the solid is soft, a “wetting ridge” near the solid/liquid/vapour triple line can also be a dissipative sink as the wetting front moves. As a consequence, the kinetics of wetting of rubber may be controlled essentially by viscoelastic losses in the polymer rather than by viscous losses in the liquid drops. Therefore, a direct analogy between the kinetics of wetting and adhesion, respectively, for a liquid and a solid on an elastomeric substrate has been recently proposed. In this paper, the superposition of viscoelastic braking and moderate rubber swelling in the drop spreading phenomenon is considered.