Temperature dependence of the contact angle of water: A review of research progress, theoretical understanding, and implications for boiling heat transfer

Contact angle, a quantitative measure of macroscopic surface wettability, plays an important role in understanding liquid-vapor heterogeneous phase change phenomena, e.g., boiling heat transfer. The contact angles of water at elevated temperatures are of particular interest for understanding of wettability-regulated boiling heat transfer in steam-based power generation. From a more theoretical perspective, the temperature dependence of contact angle of water is also essential to estimation of several key surface thermodynamic properties, such as the solid surface tension, the surface entropy, and the heats of immersion and adsorption. Here, a comprehensive review of historical efforts in measuring the contact angles of water over a wide temperature range on a variety of solids, not limited to metallic surfaces, is presented. As suggested by the literature data, the temperature dependence of contact angle of water may be classified into three regimes: (a) low temperatures below the saturation point (i.e., 100 °C at atmospheric pressure), (b) medium temperatures up to ~170 °C, and (c) high temperatures up to 300 °C at pressurized conditions. A slightly-decreasing or nearly-invariant trend of the contact angles of water on both non-metallic and metallic surfaces was reported for the low-temperature regime. In contrast, a steeper linear decline in water contact angle was demonstrated at temperatures above 100 °C. The few experimental data available on several metallic surfaces showed that the contact angle of water either again becomes nearly temperature-independent or further decreases with temperature above 210 °C. A theoretical understanding of the temperature dependence is given based on surface thermodynamic analysis, although the exact molecular mechanisms underlying these experimental observations remain unclear. Consequently, the theoretical model for predicting the variation of the contact angle of water with temperature is not well-developed. As the critical point of water (374 °C and 22.1 MPa) is approached, the surface tension, and hence the contact angle, should become vanishingly small. However, this theoretical expectation has not yet been verified due to the lack of experimental data at such high temperatures/pressures. Finally, future research directions are identified, including a systematic exploration of the contact angle at near-critical temperatures, the effects of surface oxidation, corrosion, and deposition on contact angle during operation of boilers and reactors, and the particular effect of irradiation on contact angle in nuclear reactor applications.