Design and Fabrication of a Portable Smartphone-basedContact Angle Measurement Instrument with ۳D PrintingTechnology for Surface Sciences and Engineering Applications

In plasma surface treatment, measuring contact angle of a water droplet deposited on a solid surfacewithin a few minutes after plasma treatment is necessary for wetting studies. However, the traditional andcommercially available measurement instruments are usually expensive and are not typically accessible tomost of the students at laboratories. Thus, in this study, digital fabrication technology (۳D printing) wasemployed to fabricate a low-cost, compact size and portable setup for measuring the contact angle of water(WCA) on such materials as glass, silver thin film, and gray cast iron using a smartphone before and aftertreatment. This setup consists of a stable base for holding the smartphone, a ۵microlitter (μl) Hamiltonsyringe as the liquid drop injection system, and an easily adjustable stage to hold the syringe. Theexperimental results show that proposed instrument can easily be used to measure the WCA of bothhydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces.

Keywords:

Contact angle , three dimensional (۳D) printing technology , argon atmospheric pressure plasmatreatment , Smartphone , Measurement