[Physics] Why doesn’t water actually perfectly wet glass

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According to many high school textbook sources, water perfectly wets glass. That is, the adhesion between water and glass is so strong that it is energetically favorable for a drop of water on glass to spread out and coat the entire surface. Students are often made to memorize this fact, and many physics questions use it as an assumption.

However, it's perfectly obvious that this doesn't actually happen. If you put a drop of water on glass, it might spread out a little, but it doesn't remotely coat the whole thing. In fact, I've never seen anything like the phenomenon described as "perfect wetting".

Can perfect wetting actually be observed for everyday materials? If not, what are the main additional factors preventing it from happening, as the textbooks say?

Best Answer

In everyday life glass surfaces are always covered by a layer of, well, crud. Glass surfaces are exceedingly high energy surfaces due to the high density of polar hydroxyl groups and they attract pretty much anything. This means that outside of a colloid science laboratory you will never encounter a clean glass surface.

I spent many years carrying out experiments involving interactions with glass surfaces, and to get the surface clean we had to clean it with chromic acid. A quick Google found instructions for doing this here, but if you ever feel tempted to try this at home do note the comment in that article:

The dichromate should be handled with extreme care because it is a powerful corrosive and carcinogen.

If you survive the cleaning process then you will find a water drop placed on the glass does have an effectively zero contact angle and the drop will spread out almost completely.

But it's only under these extreme conditions that you will see this. Just leaving the glass exposed to the air for a few hours is enough to coat it with a monolayer of whatever organic detritus if floating around (which if humans are present is quite a lot :-). Once this happens you aren't measuring the contact angle on glass, you are measuring it on whatever organic film is coating the glass.

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