A modified captive bubble method for determining advancing and receding contact angles

In this work, a modification to the captive bubble method was proposed to test the advancing and receding contact angle. This modification is done by adding a pressure chamber with a pressure control system to the original experimental system equipped with an optical angle mater equipped with a high speed CCD camera, a temperature control system and a computer. A series of samples with highly hydrophilic, hydrophilic, hydrophobic and superhydrophobic surfaces were prepared. The advancing and receding contact angles of these samples with highly hydrophilic, hydrophilic, and hydrophobic surfaces through the new methods was comparable to the result tested by the traditional sessile drop method. It is proved that this method overcomes the limitation of the traditional captive bubble method and the modified captive bubble method allows a smaller error from the test. However, due to the nature of the captive bubble technique, this method is also only suitable for testing the surface with advancing or receding contact angle below 130°. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.