Paper detail

Multiscale perspective on wetting on switchable substrates: mapping between microscopic and mesoscopic models

To understand the non-equilibrium relaxation dynamics of a liquid droplet on a switchable substrate the interplay of different length- and time-scales needs to be understood. We present a method to map the microscopic information, resulting from a molecular dynamics simulation, to a mesoscopic scale, reflected by a thin film model. After a discussion of the mapping procedure we first analyze the relaxation of a liquid droplet upon switching the wettability of the substrate. Further, we show that a nearly identical mapping procedure can be used for the description of two coalescing droplets. With our procedure we take a first step to extend the mapping from the equilibrium case to non-equilibrium wetting dynamics, thus allowing for a quantitative multi-scale analysis.