Wetting and roughness

We discuss in this review how the roughness of a solid impacts its wettability We see in particular that both the apparent contact angle and the contact angle hysteresis can be dramatically affected by the presence of toughness. Owing to the development of refined methods for setting very well-controlled micro- or nanotextures on a solid, these effects are being exploited to induce novel wetting properties, such as spontaneous filmification, syperhydrophobicity superoleophobicity, and interfacial slip, that could not be achieved without roughness.