Wettability and Wetting

Wetting is an important characteristic in many applications and surface wetting property is referred to as wettability. Wetting plays a very important role, for example, in the behaviour of textile materials during their processability and performance. Similarly it has a great bearing in the operations of coating, adhesion, detergency, lubrications and many such activities.

In view of the above, an overview on the subject has been compiled from the literature highlighting salient features of wetting, covering the importance of contact angle, thermodynamics of wetting and some examples of instances of daily life where wetting is encountered.