DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal. If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the "Taverne" license above, please follow below link for the End User Agreement:

A type of super-hydrophobic surface consists of a solid plane boundary with an array of grooves which, due to the effect of surface tension, prevent a complete wetting of the wall. The effect is greatest when the grooves are aligned with the flow. The pressure difference between the liquid and the gas in the grooves causes a curvature of the liquid surface resisted by surface tension. The effects of this surface deformation are studied in this paper. The corrections to the effective slip length produced by the curvature are analyzed theoretically and a comparison with available data and related mathematical models is presented.

We present a mesoscopic model, based on the Boltzmann equation, for the interaction between a solid wall and a nonideal fluid. We present an analytic derivation of the contact angle in terms of the surface tension between the liquid-gas, the liquid-solid, and the gas-solid phases. We study the dependency of the contact angle on the two free parameters of the model, which determine the interaction between the fluid and the boundaries, i.e. the equivalent of the wall density and of the wall-fluid potential in molecular dynamics studies. We compare the analytical results obtained in the hydrodynamical limit for the density profile and for the surface tension expression with the numerical simulations. We compare also our two-phase approach with some exact results obtained by E. Lauga and H. Stone [J. Fluid. Mech. 489, 55 (2003)] and J. Philip [Z. Angew. Math. Phys. 23, 960 (1972)] for a pure hydrodynamical incompressible fluid based on Navier-Stokes equations with boundary conditions made up of alternating slip and no-slip strips. Finally, we show how to overcome some theoretical limitations connected with the discretized Boltzmann scheme proposed by X. Shan and H. Chen [Phys. Rev. E 49, 2941 (1994)] and we discuss the equivalence between the surface tension defined in terms of the mechanical equilibrium and in terms of the Maxwell construction.

In some cases water droplets can completely wet microstructured superhydrophobic surfaces. The dynamics of this rapid process is analyzed by ultrahigh-speed imaging. Depending on the scales of the microstructure, the wetting fronts propagate smoothly and circularly or-more interestingly -in a stepwise manner, leading to a growing square-shaped wetted area: entering a new row perpendicular to the direction of front propagation takes milliseconds, whereas once this has happened, the row itself fills in microseconds (''zipping''). Numerical simulations confirm this view and are in quantitative agreement with the experiments.

A multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model recently introduced [R. Benzi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 026002 (2009)] to describe some dynamical behaviors of soft-flowing materials is theoretically analyzed. Equilibrium and transport properties are derived within the framework of a continuum free-energy formulation and checked against numerical simulations. Due to the competition between short-range interspecies repulsion and midrange intraspecies attraction, the model is shown to give rise to a very rich configurational dynamics of the density field, exhibiting numerous features of soft-flowing materials such as long-time relaxation due to caging effects, enhanced viscosity and structural arrest, aging under moderate shear, and shear-thinning flow above a critical shear threshold. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3216105

We present a comprehensive study of water drops sliding down chemically heterogeneous surfaces formed by a periodic pattern of alternating hydrophobic and hydrophilic stripes. Drops are found to undergo a stick-slip motion whose average speed is an order of magnitude smaller than that measured on a homogeneous surface having the same static contact angle. This motion is the result of the periodic deformations of the drop interface when crossing the stripes. Numerical simulations confirm this view and are used to elucidate the principles underlying the experimental observations.

An approach based on a lattice version of the Boltzmann kinetic equation for describing multiphase flows in nano-and microcorrugated devices is proposed. We specialize it to describe the wettingdewetting transition of fluids in the presence of nanoscopic grooves etched on the boundaries. This approach permits us to retain the essential supramolecular details of fluid-solid interactions without surrendering -actually boosting-the computational efficiency of continuum methods. The method is used to analyze the importance of conspiring effects between hydrophobicity and roughness on the global mass flow rate of the microchannel. In particular we show that smart surfaces can be tailored to yield very different mass throughput by changing the bulk pressure. The mesoscopic method is also validated quantitatively against the molecular dynamics results of [Cottin-Bizonne et al., Nat. Mater. 2, 237 (2003)].

We present a mathematical formulation of kinetic boundary conditions for Lattice Boltzmann schemes in terms of reflection, slip, and accommodation coefficients. It is analytically and numerically shown that, in the presence of a non-zero slip coefficient, the Lattice Boltzmann flow develops a physical slip flow component at the wall. Moreover, it is shown that the slip coefficient can be tuned in such a way to recover quantitative agreement with analytical and experimental results up to second order in the Knudsen number.