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Probing the hydrophobic interaction between air bubbles and partially hydrophobic surfaces using atomic force microscopy

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posted on 2024-07-09, 14:41 authored by Chen Shi, Derek Chan, Qingxia Liu, Hongbo Zeng
The hydrophobic interaction plays an essential role in various natural phenomena and industrial processes. Previous studies on the hydrophobic interaction focused mainly on the interaction between hydrophobic solid surfaces for which the effective range of hydrophobic attraction was reported to vary from ∼10 nm to >1 μm. Here, we report studies of the interaction between an air bubble in water used as a probe attached to the cantilever of an atomic force microscope and partially hydrophobized mica surfaces. No bubble attachment was observed for bare hydrophilic mica, but attachment behaviors and attraction with an exponential decay length of 0.8-1.0 nm were observed between the air bubble and partially hydrophobized mica as characterized by a water contact angle on the mica surface that varied from 45° to 85°. Our results demonstrate the important roles of the additional attraction at partially hydrophobized surfaces and hydrodynamic conditions in bubble attachment to substrate surfaces and provide new insights into the basic understanding of this interaction mechanism in various applications such as mineral flotation.

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PDF (Accepted manuscript)

ISSN

1932-7455

Journal title

Journal of Physical Chemistry C

Volume

118

Issue

43

Pagination

8 pp

Publisher

American Chemical Society

Copyright statement

Copyright © 2014 American Chemical Society. This document is the unedited manuscript of a submitted work that was subsequently accepted for publication in Journal of Physical Chemistry C, copyright © American Chemical Society after peer review. To access the final edited and published work, see http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jp507164c.

Language

eng

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