Binary Mixture Droplet Evaporation on Microstructured Decorated Surfaces and the Mixed Stick–Slip Modes

The interactions between liquid droplets and solid surfaces during wetting and phase change are important to many applications and are related to the physicochemical properties of the substrate and the fluid. In this work, we investigate experimentally the evaporation of pure water, pure ethanol, and their binary mixture droplets, accessing a wide range of surface tensions, on hydrophobic micro-pillared surfaces varying the spacing between the pillars. Results show that on structured surfaces, droplets evaporate following three classical evaporative behaviors: constant contact radius/pinning, stick–slip, or mixed mode. In addition, we report two further droplet evaporation modes, which are a mixed stick–slip mode where the contact angle increases while the contact radius decreases in a stick–slip fashion and a mixed stick–slip mode where both the contact angle and the contact radius decrease in a stick–slip fashion. We name these evaporation modes not yet reported in the literature as the increasing and decreasing contact angle mixed stick–slip modes, respectively. The former ensues because the fluid surface tension increases as the most volatile fluid evaporates coupled to the presence of structures, whereas the latter is due to the presence of structures for either fluid. The duration of each evaporation mode is dissimilar and depends on the surface tension and on the spacing between structures. Pure water yields longer initial pinning times on all surfaces before stick–slip ensues, whereas for binary mixtures and pure ethanol, initial pinning ensues mainly on short spacing structures due to the different wetting regimes displayed. Meanwhile, mixed stick–slip modes ensue mainly for high ethanol concentrations and/or pure ethanol independent of the solid fraction and for low ethanol concentrations on large spacing. Contact line jumps, changes in contact angle and pinning forces are also presented and discussed. This investigation provides guidelines for tailoring the evaporation of a wide range of surface tension fluids on structured surfaces for inkjet printing, DNA patterning, or microfluidics applications.