Effects of square micro-pillar array porosity on the liquid motion of near surface layer

The influence rules of square micro-pillar array porosity on the liquid motion characteristics of the near-surface layer are investigated by quartz crystal microbalance (QCM). QCM is a powerful and promising technique in studying the interfacial behavior, which exhibits great advantages in investigating the effects of surface microstructure, roughness, and array. In our experiments, three different arrays with the same height of about 280 nm and center distance of 200 μm, but different diameters of about 78 μm, 139 μm, and 179 μm are investigated. The results indicate that when the surface array has a large porosity, its influence on the liquid motion of the near surface layer is slight, thus resulting in a small increase of half-bandwidth variation due to the additional friction energy dissipation. When the surface array has a small porosity, the array tends to make the liquid film trapped in the array oscillating with the substrate, then there may be a layer of liquid film behaving like rigid film, and it also will make the liquid motion near the array layer more complicated. Thus for the #3 surface with a small porosity, both the absolute values of frequency shift |Δf 3| and half-bandwidth variation ΔΓ 3 increase obviously. The experimental results show good consistence with the theoretical model of Daikhin and Urbakh. This study sheds light on understanding the influence mechanism of surface array porosity on the liquid motion of near-surface layer.