Wetting of curved surfaces

As a first step towards a microscopic understanding of the effective interaction between colloidal particles suspended in a solvent, we study the wetting behavior of one-component fluids at spheres and fibers. We describe these phenomena within density functional theory which keeps track of the microscopic interaction potentials governing these systems. In particular, we properly take into account the power-law decay of both the fluid-fluid interaction potentials and the substrate potentials. The thicknesses of the wetting films as a function of temperature and chemical potential as well as the wetting phase diagrams are determined by minimizing an effective interface potential which we obtain by applying a sharp-kink approximation to the density functional. We compare our results with previous approaches to this problem. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.