Dentinal tubules driven wetting of dentin: Cassie-Baxter modelling

We investigate the wetting properties of dentin surfaces submitted to a phosphoric acid etching followed by an air drying procedure, as in clinical situations of adhesive dentistry. The surface topography of the etched surfaces was characterized by AFM, and the wetting properties of water on these rough and heterogeneous surfaces were studied, by contact angle measurements. We showed that the contact angle increases with the acid exposure time and consequently with both surface roughness and the organicmineral ratio of the dentin components. From the whole results, obtained on dentin and also on synthesized hydroxyapatites samples, we inferred a water contact angle of ~133° on the dentinal tubule. These experimental results may be described by the Cassie-Baxter approach, and it is suggested that small air pockets could be formed inside the dentinal tubules.

Wetting on nanorough surfaces

We investigate the wetting properties of random nanostructured surfaces, with particular attention devoted to the phenomenon of contact angle hysteresis. For this purpose, solid substrates were initially tailored at a nanometric scale by using swift heavy ion irradiation which produced a random distribution of defects. We characterize the wetting properties of water on these heterogeneous surfaces by an average spreading parameter and by the contact angle hysteresis. For weak values of the areal density of defects phi(d), the hysteresis grows linearly with phi(d), indicating that the defects pin the contact line individually. However, at higher values of phi(d), collective pinning effects appear and the hysteresis decreases with increasing phi(d). We show that in the linear regime our experimental results are in good quantitative agreement with theoretical predictions for contact angle hysteresis induced by a single isolated defect on a solid surface.