A general law for liquid metal-onto-ceramic wetting: An electrostatic approach

During the last decades, an intense research effort has been carried out to predict and model the equilibrium reactive wetting contact angle of liquid metals onto diverse ceramic surfaces. The experimental results display a large scattering, which has been attributed to several causes: degree of purity of the liquid metal, adsorption, chemical reactions along the liquid–solid interface, etc. ork presents a model to explain such results. It considers as a basic tool the presence of an electrostatic field generated by the metal impurities-ceramic surface charge transfer. The addition of the corresponding electrostatic force to the Young–Dupré equilibrium equation modifies the equilibrium contact angle in ceramics–metals reactive wetting. The theoretical values are in excellent agreement with the reported values in the literature. Thus, charge transfer and the electrostatic effects associated to that transfer constitute a landmark for the comprehension of the equilibrium wetting angle in metal–ceramic systems.