Kinetics of wetting and spreading by aqueous surfactant solutions

Interest in wetting dynamics processes has immensely increased during the past 10–15 years. In many industrial and medical applications, some strategies to control drop spreading on solid surfaces are being developed. One possibility is that a surfactant, a surface-active polymer, a polyelectrolyte or their mixture are added to a liquid (usually water). The main idea of the paper is to give an overview on some dynamic wetting and spreading phenomena in the presence of surfactants in the case of smooth or porous substrates, which can be either moderately or highly hydrophobic surfaces based on the literature data and the authors own investigations. Instability problems associated with spreading over dry or pre-wetted hydrophilic surfaces as well as over thin aqueous layers are briefly discussed. Toward a better understanding of the superspreading phenomenon, unusual wetting properties of trisiloxanes on hydrophobic surfaces are also discussed.