Kinetic analysis of wetting and spreading at high temperatures: A review

The kinetic factors of the liquid–solid interface formation process are extremely useful in the design of composite preparation methods and the manufacture of comprehensive performance-controlled metal- or ceramic-based composites. Here, we review the available spreading dynamic models, focusing on wetting at high temperatures. There is yet to be developed a general spreading dynamic model with complete physical meaning that can accurately describe complicated surface–interface kinetic processes at high temperatures. In this work, we highlight common analysis errors in the description of the spreading dynamics for metal–ceramic and metal–metal systems. By unifying the expressions of the spreading dynamic models as the function f(v, θd) and fitting the experimental data reported in the literature, we discovered that the molecular-kinetic model commonly used to describe adsorption-controlled spreading at room temperature and reaction-limited spreading model used at high temperature have a certain range of overlap. When the condition σlv(cosθe–cosθd) < <2nkBT is satisfied, these models are consistent in terms of mathematical functional expressions. As a result, distinguishing between them when the spreading behavior includes both adsorption and reaction is challenging.