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Abstract

Wetting phenomena are common in daily life, such as water droplets sliding on a window during rainy days. Recent research has focused on wetting behavior on soft solid materials such as elastomers and polymeric gels, which have promising applications, for example in biomedicine, tissue engineering, and soft robotics. Studies have shown that droplets move significantly slower on soft solids than on rigid surfaces—by orders of magnitude—due to dominant viscoelastic dissipation within the material. In this talk, I will introduce a model that explores contact line motion and the dissipation mechanisms arising from both viscoelasticity and poroelasticity in soft solids. Understanding these dissipation processes is essential for accurately describing droplet motion across different solid materials.