ABSTRACT
Triple line (TL) motion during wetting or dewetting involves, as yet, incompletely understood phenomena occurring very near the "line" itself (clearly, at a molecular scale, the concept of a "line" breaks down). A range of models has been proposed in the literature with two principal bases corresponding to (a) hydrodynamic resistance (Poiseuille shear flow) dynamically balancing the capillary force (unequilibrated Young force) [1-4] and (b) liquid molecular transfer obeying a molecular kinetics approach [5-12]. The latter approach stems from application of the Eyring theory for activated processes [13] and, in the general sense, could be applicable to any mass transfer process involving sufficiently small amounts of matter (and energy) for Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics to apply [9]. The original paper by Cherry and Holmes [5] suggested a mechanism of activated viscous flow and later work propounded rate theories to explain the TL motion in terms of molecular transfer by "jumping" [6-7].
