The wettability of a surface—whether drops of water or
another liquid bead up or spread out when they come into contact
with it—is a crucial factor in a wide variety of commercial and
industrial applications, such as how efficiently boilers and
condensers work in power plants or how heat pipes funnel heat away
in industrial processes. This characteristic has long been seen as
a fixed property of a given pair of liquid and solid materials, but
now MIT researchers have developed a way of making even the most
unlikely pairings of materials take on a desired level of
wettability.
