Hydrophilicity is a surface’s ability to absorb water, with hydrophilic surfaces easily breaking bonds between water molecules and bonding with them. Hydrophobic surfaces repel water. Hydrophilic surfaces can dry out through evaporation. Hydrophilicity can be determined by observing how quickly a surface absorbs water and can vary with different liquids. It is important for engineers to understand hydrophilicity to develop materials for specific uses.
Hydrophilicity is the tendency of a surface to get wet or absorb water. In general, when a surface exhibits hydrophilicity, water molecules form bonds with surface molecules. A material is neither necessarily fully hydrophilic nor hydrophobic because these two tendencies are either end of a spectrum, and a material can fall anywhere along that spectrum.
On a surface that exhibits hydrophilicity, the bonds between water molecules are broken easily, and the water molecules are able to bond with molecules in the hydrophilic surface. The bonds between the single oxygen atom and the two hydrogen atoms in a single water molecule do not break, but the weaker bonds that occur between hydrogen atoms in different water molecules are. Once these bonds are broken, the molecules in the hydrophilic surface are able to form bonds with the hydrogen atoms on the water molecules. Hydrophobic surfaces, on the other hand, don’t bind to water molecules easily, which allows the water to become bound to itself and create droplets.
After water molecules form a bond with a hydrophilic surface, the surface is said to be wet. Once water has been absorbed at the molecular level, it can be removed from the other molecular structure through the process of evaporation. Simply put, under hot, dry conditions and over any length of time, most hydrophilic surfaces will dry out as the liquid water evaporates and becomes airborne.
While there are ways to determine hydrophilicity that use precise mathematical formulas, it is also possible to roughly determine how quickly a surface absorbs water by making a few simple observations. If drops of water remain on the surface and slide off easily when the surface is tilted towards the ground, the material is said to be particularly hydrophobic. If, on the other hand, water is absorbed by the surface and that surface becomes wet, it is hydrophilic.
In most cases, hydrophilicity refers to how quickly a surface reacts with water molecules. It is also possible to measure the hydrophilicity of a surface when it comes into contact with other liquids. When examining the behavior of a surface with various liquids, its hydrophilicity for one liquid is not necessarily predicted by its behavior with another liquid. Understanding how hydrophilic a surface is can help engineers develop materials that exhibit the right amount of hydrophilicity for their intended use.
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